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CAMBRIDGE ECONOMIC HANDBOOKS.—V 


GENERAL EDITOR: J. M. KEYNES, M.A., C.B. 


POPULATION 


POPULATION 


BY 
HAROLD WRIGHT 


M.A. 


PEMBROKE COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE 


WITH A PREFACE BY 
J. M. KEYNES 


M.A., C.B. 


FELLOW OF KING’S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGH 


NEW YORK 
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY 


COPYRIGHT, 1923, BY 
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC. 


Printed in the U.S. A. 


44. 


Foam 4 


PREFACE 


_A BELIEF in the material progress of mankind is not 

. old. During the greater part of history such a belief 
“ was neither compatible with experience nor encour- 

~ aged by religion. It is doubtful whether, taking one 

- century with another, there was much variation in the 
lot of the unskilled laborer at the centers of civilization 
in the two thousand years from the Greece of Solon to 
the England of Charles II or the France of Louis XIV. 
Paganism placed the Golden Age behind us; Chris- 
tianity raised Heaven above us; and anyone, before the 
middle of the eighteenth century, who had expected 
a progressive improvement in material welfare here, as 

a result of the division of labor, the discoveries of sci- 
ence and the boundless fecundity of the species, would 
have been thought very eccentric. 

In the eighteenth century, for obscure reasons which 
economic historians have not yet sufficiently explored, 
material progress commenced over wide areas in a de- 
cided and cumulative fashion not previously experi- 
enced. Philosophers were ready with an appropriate 


Z| 


_. superstition, and before the century was out Priestley’s 


view was becoming fashionable, that, by the further 


<> division of labor,—‘‘ Nature, including both its materi- 


als and its laws, will be more at our command; men 
will make their situation in this world abundantly more 
easy and comfortable; they will prolong their exist- 
ence in it and will grow daily more happy.” 


_. It was against the philosophers of this school that 


v 


v1 PREFACE 


Malthus directed his Essay. Its arguments impressed 
his reasonable contemporaries, and the interruption 
to progress by the Napoleonic wars supplied a favor- 
able atmosphere. But as the nineteenth century pro- 
ceeded, the tendency to material progress reasserted 
itself. Malthus was forgotten or discredited. The 
cloud was lifted; the classical Economists dethroned; 
and the opinions of the Vicar of Wakefield, who “was 
ever of opinion that the honest man who married and 
brought up a large family did more service than he 
who continued single and only talked of population,’ 
and of Adam Smith, who held that ‘‘the most decisive 
mark of the prosperity of any country is the increase 
of the number of its inhabitants,”’ almost recovered 
their sway. 

Nevertheless, the interruption to prosperity by the 
war, corresponding to the similar interruption a hun- 
dred years before, has again encouraged an atmos- 
phere of doubt; and there are some who have a care. 
The most interesting question in the world (of those 
at least to which time will bring us an answer) 
is whether, after a short interval of recovery, material 
progress will be resumed, or whether, on the other 
hand, the magnificent episode of the nineteenth cen- 
tury is over. 

In this volume of the Cambridge Economic Hand- 
books Mr. Harold Wright summarizes the data, and 
outlines the main features of the Problem of Popula- 
tion. It is no part of the purpose of this Series to pre- 
sent ready-made conclusions. Our object is to aid 
and stimulate study. The topic of this particular 
volume is one about which it is difficult, for anyone 
who has given much thought to it, not to feel strongly. 


PREFACE vil 


But Mr. Wright has avoided propagandism and has 
_ been concerned to display in a calm spirit the extraor- 
_ dinary interest, difficulty and importance of his sub- 
ject, rather than to advocate any definite policies. His 
object will have been accomplished if he can do some- 
thing to direct the thoughts of a few more students to 
what is going to be not merely an economist’s prob- 
lem, but, in the near future, the greatest of all social 
questions,—a question which will arouse some of the 
deepest instincts and emotions of men, and about which 
feeling may run as passionately as in earlier struggles 
between religions. A great transition in human his- 
tory will have begun when civilized man endeavors 
to assume conscious control in his own hands, away 
from the blind instinct of mere predominant survival. 


J. M. KEYNES. 


CONTENTS 


CHAPTER I 
EARLY POPULATION THEORIES 


. INTRODUCTORY 

. GREEK AND RoMAN Porn Caner 

. Tue INFLUENCE OF THE EARLY CHRISTIANS 

. SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY WRITERS 


ON POPULATION PROBLEMS . 


. THE INTRODUCTION OF VITAL STATISTICS 
. THe FORERUNNERS OF MALTHUS 


CHAPTER II 
MALTHUS 


. AN ESSAY ON THE PRINCIPLE OF POPULATION 

. THe MALTHUSIAN ARGUMENT . 

. THe Law or DIMINISHING RETURNS 

. THE RELEVANCE OF THE MALTHUSIAN ence TO 


PRESENT CIRCUMSTANCES 


. AN IMporRTANT DEVELOPMENT 


CHAPTER III 


CIRCUMSTANCES 


. WHY MALTHUS HAD MANY DISCIPLES i 
. How DriminisHiInG Returns REVEALED Peiaatae 

. REACTION AGAINST MaLTHUS AND RICARDO 

. J. S. Miiw’s View or PorpuLATION PROBLEMS 

. A Criticism or Miiu’s VIEw . 

. THE REeTuRN TO MALTHUS 


ix 


20 
22 
28 


32 
36 


POPULATION THEORIES IN CHANGING 


40 
43 
45 
48 
51 
54 


CONTENTS 


CHAPTER IV 
FOOD AND RAW MATERIALS 


. ANALOGY BETWEEN A SHRINKING EARTH AND A GROW- 


ING POPULATION 


. THe TRANSFERENCE OF Reiscncna IN Wane 
. THE PRESSURE OF POPULATION UPON SUBSISTENCE 
. Tar Economic ADVANTAGES OF A GROWING PopvU- 


LATION 


. THE SUPPLY OF nee Connon 
. THe Suppty oF Woou 
. FISHERIES 


CHAPTER V 
COAL AND IRON 


. JEVONS AND THE COAL QUESTION 

. THe MEANING oF “‘ EXHAUSTION” 

. THE INFLUENCE OF PROTECTION 

. Tot Worwpd’s Coat RESERVES 

. THE Export TRADE IN COAL . 

. SUBSTITUTES FOR COAL . : : : : 
. IRon .. : : : : SUNG: a) 
. GREAT BRITAIN’S Pager 


CHAPTER VI 
THE GROWTH OF POPULATION 


. CHANGES IN THE BIRTH-RATE 
. CHANGES IN THE DEATH-RATE 
. Tae RevativE INFLUENCE OF Bisee wae AND 


DEATH-RATE UPON THE GROWTH OF POPULATION 


. PREVENTIVE CHECKS TO POPULATION 

. UNDER-POPULATION 

. A FanuinG BIRTH-RATE . 

. Some EXPLANATIONS OF THE usta IN THE Binaet 


RATE 


PAGE 


99 
102 


103 
106 
107 
108 


111 


§ 8. 


~ § 9. 


§ 10. Tor IMPORTANCE OF THE DECLINE IN THE BIRTH- 


CONTENTS 


VARIATIONS IN THE BIRTH-RATE BETWEEN DIFFER- 
ENT CLASSES 
OTHER FACTORS Taridancine THE eypcetanllnaie 


RATE 


CHAPTER VII 


xl 


PAGE 


113 
115 


117 


INTERNATIONAL POPULATION PROBLEMS 


CO? COrn (Or 
— it he 
bn = © 


CO? COP (CO? CO? tO? 46? tO? 6? OM 
OONAMARWNH ee 


THE INFLUENCE OF NATIONALITY . 


. JAPAN AND INDIA 

. THe Bie Four 

. Tae UNITED STATES 
. Tue British EMPIRE 


FRANCE 


. GERMANY 
. RUSSIA 


WaR AND Paeatacae é 


. WAR AND SUBSISTENCE 
. EMIGRATION 
. THEt DANGER TO Civiiseinion 


CHAPTER VIII 
THE QUALITY OF POPULATION 


. INTRODUCTORY 

. WHY THERE ARE MORE Wenn THAN itn 

. Tae FEertTiLity or DIFFERENT CLASSES 

. A Caus& or THE Hicu BIRTH-RATE AMONG THE Poor 

. EUGENIC CONSIDERATIONS : 

. PRESENT LIMITATIONS OF EUGENICS . 

. Toe RevativeE IMporRTANCE OF HEREDITY AND Tin 


VIRONMENT 


. THE RELATION BETWEEN + Quanrrry AND Quatrry OF 


POPULATION 


119 
120 
123 
123 
124 
125 
127 
129 
130 
134 
140 
146 


148 
148 
150 
153 
154 
158 


159 


160 


CONTENTS 


CHAPTER IX 
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 


. RECAPITULATORY 

. A Forecast By MALTHUS 

. THE Wor.Lp’s RESOURCES 

. Toe Way Out F : R 
. POSSIBLE SCIENTIFIC DEVELOPMENTS 
. THE VALUE oF DISCUSSION 


PAGE 
165 
167 
168 
169 
170 
173 


POPULATION 


CHAPTER I 
EARLY POPULATION THEORIES 


“Ts there anything whereof it may be said, See, this is 
new? It hath been already of old time, which was before us.” 
Ecclesiastes 1. 10. 


§ 1. Introductory. “The view once widely held that 
the principle of population must inevitably keep the 
mass of the people close to the verge of the bare means 
of subsistence was no statement of a desirable ideal. 
It was a nightmare; a nightmare none the less, though 
it may haunt us yet.’”’ So wrote Mr. Henderson in the 
first volume of this series; and it is the purpose of this, 
the fifth volume, to explain what is meant by “the prin- 
ciple of population’’; to examine its validity as a uni- 
versal economic law, and to inquire how far the truth 
in this matter is a menace to the progress of mankind; 
a nightmare which must haunt us yet. 

Economists have often been accused of being too 
little guided by the actual experience of mankind. 
Sometimes, no doubt, they have been guilty of this 
fault. At other times, however, the tendency has been 
to err in the other direction and to mistake the pecul- 
iar conditions of a particular period in the evolution 
of human society for the permanent and inevitable 
results of the working of economic laws. This latter 

1 


2 POPULATION 


tendency has always been very much in evidence 
with regard to questions about population. When 
small communities have sought to maintain exclusive 
possession of large and fertile lands, their learned men 
have naturally taught them that an increasing pop- 
ulation was an unmixed blessing, since it provided 
more hands to till the soil and more soldiers to defend 
the fields. When, on the other hand, a community 
found itself confined to a certain definite area, and that 
area was well supplied with human beings, a wise man 
would arise and point out that the means of subsist- 
ence were limited and that a further increase in the 
population must inevitably involve hunger and mis- 
ery, unless an outlet could be found in other lands. 
Both doctrines were perfectly sound in their applica- 
tion to the circumstances of the particular peoples to 
whom they were addressed; but the doctrines were 
frequently couched in general terms, as though they 
must neccessarily apply to all nations at all times, 
which they certainly do not. Even T. R. Malthus, 
whose essay on The Principle of Population, first pub- 
lished in 1798, still holds the field as the classic expo- 
sition of this subject, owed much of his early fame to 
the special economic circumstances of Great Britain 
in the early years of the nineteenth century, and 
suffered a partial eclipse owing to changes which did 
not in any way invalidate his main argument. 


§ 2. Greek and Roman Population Theories. The an- 
cient Greeks characteristically approached the popula- 
tion question from the point of view of the ideal City 
State. They made up their minds first as to the num- 
ber of citizens that would produce the most satisfac- 


EARLY POPULATION THEORIES 3 


tory political and social unit, and then took steps to 
keep the population up to the desired level and to pre- 
vent it from increasing beyond it. They took account 
of the quality as well as of citizens, and endeav- 
ored to eliminate the unfit from their societies. In 
Sparta there seems to have been little fear of over- 
population, except in regard to the slaves, whose num- 
bers were kept in check by such devices as infanticide. 
Frequent wars took their toll of young freemen, and 
created an urgent demand for more. ‘Thus, in Sparta, 
the State regulations respecting marriage and pro- 
creation were mainly directed towards a high birth- 
rate of healthy children. Every Spartan was expected 
to marry for the good of the State. Bachelors were 
subjected to social indignities as well as to legal and 
political disabilities. Marriages were supervised with 
a view to the production of children sound in body 
and mind, and the fathers of three or more sons were 
publicly rewarded. 

In Athens, the regulation of marriage was less rigid 
than in Sparta. There, too, laws existed against cel- 
ibacy; but in times of peace these were not enforced, 
and late marriages were advocated. The Athenian 
remedy for over-population was emigration, but in- 
fanticide was also a recognized custom. Malthus re- 
marks that “when Solon permitted the exposing of 
_ children, it is probable that he only gave the sanction 
of law to a custom already prevalent’’; adding with 
characteristic shrewdness: 


“Tn this permission he had without doubt two ends in 
view. First, that which is most obvious, the prevention of 
such an excessive population as would cause universal pov- 
erty and discontent; and, secondly, that of keeving the pop- 


4 - POPULATION 


ulation up to the level of what the territory could support, 
by removing the terrors of too numerous a family and conse- 
quently the principal obstacle to marriage.”’ 


In addition to those two motives, the Greeks were 
inclined to look favorably upon infanticide as a eugen- 
nic device; for weakly or deformed children were ex- 
posed in Sparta by order of the State, a practice which 
Plato and Aristotle both approved. 

Malthus was clearly justified in saying that infan- 
ticide was frequently adopted among primitive peo- © 
ples as a means of keeping the population within the 
means of subsistence. In Polynesia, for instance, the © 
islands being small though the climate is favorable 
to the production of food, the custom was generally 
observed. In the Hawaiian Islands all children after © 
the third or fourth were strangled or buried alive. At 
Tahiti, fathers had the right (and used it) of suffo- 
cating their newly born children. The Areois, in the 
Society Islands, imposed infanticide upon the women 
members by oath. In fact, although a religious sanc- 
tion is often given to the slaughter of infants among — 
savage tribes, this practice or others restricting in- 
crease seem to be generally prevalent among those 
peoples who have reason to fear that their food supply 
may prove insufficient for their support, while in some 
countries infants are destroyed in times of scarcity only. 
It is therefore reasonable to suppose that some fear of 
over-population played a part in originating this cus- 
tom among the ancient Greeks. 

Infanticide was prevalent among the Romans also, 
but it is improbable that the practice was encouraged 
by their rulers. As a conquering race they were always 


EARLY POPULATION THEORIES 5 


obsessed with the need for soldiers and colonists. Their 
legislation respecting marriage and parenthood was 
therefore directed towards an increase in population. 
As in Sparta, rewards were given to the fathers of fam- 
ilies and penalties imposed upon bachelors. Plutarch 
says of Camillus that ‘‘as the wars had made many 
_ widows, he obliged such of the men as lived single, 
partly by persuasion and partly by. threatening them 
with fines, to marry the widows.’’ Whether any Ro- 
man Weller stood out against this terrifying edict is not 
recorded! In the early days of the Empire, the popula- 
tion question appears to have caused considerable 
anxiety. Augustus resorted to elaborate legislation. 
He enacted that men and women must be married and 
have children before the men were twenty-five and 
women twenty. Those who disobeyed this law by re- 
maining unmarried were disqualified from becoming 
heirs or receiving legacies. ‘Those who married but 
had no children could receive only half of any property 
left to them, and could bequeath only one-tenth of 
their property to their widows. On the other hand, 
honors and privileges were bestowed upon prolific par- 
ents. | 

The object of this legislation seems, however, to 
have been the preservation of the patrician families 
rather than the increase of the numbers of the whole 
people. If this was the intention, it was defeated by 
the luxury and vice that prevailed among the upper 
classes in imperial Rome. 


§3. The Influence of the Early Christians. Harly Chris- 
tian morality was in its nature a reaction from the im- 
morality of Rome, and by its insistence upon the vir- 


6 POPULATION 


tues of chastity and virginity it treated marriage as an 
inferior state, to be tolerated but not to be encouraged. 
There were slight differences between the various sects 
and preachers as to the degree to which marriage fell 
off from perfection, but all agreed in regarding it as a 
concession to human frailty. Political and economic 
considerations were completely disregarded by the 
Fathers, some of whom did not desire the human race 
to continue on the earth. Thus Methodius writing 
On Virginity says: 


“For the world, while still unfilled with men, was like a 
child, and it was necessary that it should first be filled with 
these, and so grow to manhood. But when thereafter it was 
colonised from end to end, the race of man spreading to a 
boundless extent, God no longer allowed man to remain in 
the same ways, considering how they might now proceed 
from one point to another and advance nearer heaven, until ° 
having attained to the greatest and most exalted lesson of 
virginity they should reach to perfection; that first they 
should abandon the intermarriage of brothers and sisters 
and marry wives from other families; and then that they 
should no longer have many wives, like brute beasts as though 
born for the mere propagation of the species; and then that 
they should not be adulterers; and then again that they should 
go on to continence, and from continence to virginity, when, 
having trained themselves to despise the flesh, they sail fear- 
lessly into the peaceful haven of immortality.” 


The effect of the early Christian view of marriage 
and procreation upon imperial policy is shown by the 
fifth-century church historian Sozomen, who says that 
the Emperor (Constantine): 


“deeming it absurd to attempt the multiplication of the hu- 
man species by the care and zeal of man (since nature always 


EARLY POPULATION THEORIES 7 


receives increase or decrease according to the fiat from on 
high), made a law enjoining that the unmarried and childless 

_should have the same advantages as the married. He even 
bestowed. peculiar privileges on those who embraced a life 
of continence and virginity.” 


§ 4. Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century Writers on Pop- 
ulation Problems. From this brief survey of the atti- 
tude of the ancient world towards population problems, 
we must now jump to modern Europe and take an 
equally hasty glance at the views of those writers who 
‘preceded Malthus in the consideration of these matters. 

In Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, as in the ideal com- 
monwealths of the ancient Greeks, it 1s considered im- 
portant to maintain a constant population: 


“Lest any city should become either too great or by any 
accident be dispeopled, provision is made that none of their 
cities may contain more than six thousand persons besides 
those of the country round. No family may have less than 
ten or more than sixteen children, but there can be no deter- 
mined numbers of children under age. This rule is easily 
observed by removing.some of a more fruitful couple to any 
other family that does not so abound in them. By the same 
rule they supply cities that do not increase so fast from others 
that breed faster; and if there is any increase over the whole 
island they draw out a number of their citizens from the sev- 
eral towns, and send them over to a neighbouring continent, 
where ... they fixa colony. . . . Such care is taken of the 
soil that it becomes fruitful enough to supply provisions for 
all, though it might otherwise be too narrow and barren.” 


If the influence of Plato, or his own insight, led Sir 
Thomas More to regard excessive population as an 
evil, no such calculation was sanctioned by his con- 
temporary, Luther, whose views on this subject had 


8 POPULATION 


a profound influence on the Protestant world, an in- 
fluence which is not yet exhausted. 


“God,” said Luther, ‘‘has shown how sufficiently He cares 
for us, when He created heaven and earth, all animals and 
plants, before He created man. He shows us thus that He 
will always provide food and shelter sufficient for our needs. 
It is only necessary that we work and do not remain idle; we 
shall assuredly be both clothed and fed. . . . From all this 
we draw the conclusion that whoever finds himself unfitted 
to remain chaste should make arrangements betimes and 
get some work and then dare, in God’s name, to enter into 
matrimony. A youth should marry not later than his twen- 
tieth year, and a maiden when she is between fifteen and 
eighteen years old. Then they should remain upright and 
serious and let God provide the way and means by which 
their children shall be nourished.” 


This pronouncement has shared the fate of many 
another striking utterance. It has been stripped of 
its qualifying phrases and used as a substitute for com- 
mon sense. How many careless parents have cried, 
“Let God provide!”’ without first taking the precau- 
tion of “making arrangements betimes and getting 
some work,’’ or even remembering to “remain upright 
and serious.” 

English writers of the early seventeenth century, 
seeing destitution and poverty around them, regarded 
over-population as a very real thing and a potent cause 
of international strife. Thus, Sir Walter Raleigh in 
his Discourse of War in General, said: 


‘““When any country is overlaid by the multitude which 
live upon it, there is a natural necessity compelling it to dis- 
burden itself and lay the load: upon others, by right or wrong, 
for (to omit the danger of pestilence, often visiting them that 


EARLY POPULATION THEORIES 9 


live in throngs) there is no misery that urgeth men so vio- 
lently unto desperate courses and contempt of death as the 
_ torments and threats of famine. Wherefore, the war that is 
grounded on general remediless necessity, may be termed the 
general and remediless or necessary war.’ 


Elsewhere he wrote that the earth would not only 
be full, but overflowing with human beings, were it 
not for the effect of hunger, pestilence, crime and war, 
and of abstinence and artificial sterility. 

Bacon and other writers of the period also express 
the view that wars are caused by the pressure of popu- 
lation on the means of subsistence. 

When we come to the next great period in economic 
history, however, we find almost every writer on the 
subject dwelling upon the advantages of large and 
growing populations. The growth of large States, in- 
creasing in power and the love of power, developing 
an industrial and commercial life which made the main- 
tenance of a larger population possible, and indulging 
in wars which required a constant supply of wealth and 
life to feed them, led inevitably to the revival of the 
Roman view that marriage and procreation were 
duties which the citizen owed to the State. This view 
was emphasized by the fact that the Thirty Years War, 
in which practically the whole of Europe had been in- 


- volved during the early part of the seventeenth cen- 


tury, had depleted the population to an appalling ex- 
tent. In Bohemia it is said that only about 6000 vil- 
lages out of 35,000 escaped destruction; Moravia and 
Silesia suffered a similar fate; Bavaria, Franconia and 
Swabia were desolated by famine and disease, while 
the rest of Germany and Austria fared little better. 
“During more than a generation after the conclusion 


10 POPULATION 


of the war a full third of the land in northern Ger- 
many was left uncultivated. Cattle and sheep dimin- 
ished to an extraordinary extent, and many once fertile 
districts became forests inhabited by wolves and other 
savage beasts.’ } 

In the course of this war the population of the Em- 
pire is believed to have diminished by at least two- 
thirds—from over sixteen to under six millions. In the 
Lower Palatinate only one-tenth and in Wiirttemberg 
only one-sixth survived. 

- Under these circumstances it is not surprising that 
Mr. Stangeland should find in his study of German 
literature on the subject that “the opinions on 
population from the end of the Thirty Years War to 
the beginning of the eighteenth century were unan- 
imously favourable to the greatest possible increase.” 2 
Thus Leibnitz thought that the State should encour- 
age marriage because “the true power of a kingdom 
consists in the number of men. Where there are men, 
there is substance and strength. Where men are most — 
diligent and laborious and saving of their goods, there 
all are safest; and manufacturing especially is to be 
considered the most useful occupation in accomplishing 
this result.”’” Christian Wolff (1679-1754), a disciple of 
Leibnitz, who is said to have been one of the first to 
“teach philosophy to speak German,” expressed a 
crudely militarist point of view about population prob- 
lems. Power, he said, consists in money, in the army 
which a state is able to keep, and in the greatest 
amount of employment; but above all in a rich and 
populous state; but ‘wealth is superior to numbers of 


1 Cambridge Modern History, Vol. IV, p. 419. 
2 Pre-Malthustan Doctrines of Population, by C. E. Stangeland. 


EARLY POPULATION THEORIES 11 


subjects; for where there is enough money an army 
can always be maintained, and when necessary foreign 
mercenaries can be hired to defend the country. If 
there is no money with which to support an army, a 
multitude of people is of small service.” 


§ 5. The Introduction of Vital Statistics. Johann Peter 
Siissmilch (1707-1767), one of Frederick the Great’s 
military chaplains, was the first writer to deduce a 
principle of population from the study of vital statistics 
which had been collected by various English and Ger- 
man writers during the latter half of the seventeenth 
century. His investigation made him optimistic con- 
cerning both the desirability and the possibility of 
increase. Improvements in the methods of production, 
especially in agriculture, would, he thought, greatly 
increase the food supply. With more intensive cultiva- 
tion, the yield of land could be increased an hundred- 
fold. God regulated population according to the sup- 
plies He had given. It was the duty of statesmen to 
encourage population, because it was the means of hap- 
piness, security, power and wealth. 

Siissmilch detected four great natural checks to the 
increase of mankind: 


(a) Pestilence, which often carried off half the pop- 
ulation, not only of cities, but of whole provinces. 

(6) War, “a real monster, a disgraceful blot on rea- 
son and humanity, and especially on Christian- 
ity,’ which robbed the State of many of its best 
citizens and also diminished the means of sub- 
sistence. 

(c) Famine. 

(d) Earthquakes and floods. 


12 POPULATION 


This notable contribution towards a true theory of 
population was rendered possible by the Polttical 
Arithmetic of Graunt (1620-1674) and Petty (1623- 
1687), who first attempted to collect statistics of births, 
deaths and marriages in the city of London. Gregory 
King, Lancaster Herald, whom Macaulay describes 
as ‘‘a political arithmetician of great acuteness and 
judgment,” carried this work a step further when he 
compiled his Natural and Political Observations and 
Conclusions upon the State and Condition of England, 
1696. Basing his calculations mainly upon the num- 
ber of houses returned in 1690 by the officers who made 
the last collection of the hearth money, he arrived at the 
conclusion that the population of England was nearly 
five millions and a half, an estimate that has since 
received confirmation from independent sources. From 
this figure and the information he collected about the 
birth and death-rates, King made the following in- 
genious deductions, which are worth reproducing, both 
for their intrinsic interest and as an indication of the. 
pitfalls of political arithmetic.: 


“That, Anno 1260, or about 200 years after the Norman 
Conquest, the kingdom had 2,750,000 people,! or half the 
present number; so that the people of England have doubled 
in about 435 years last past; 

“That in probability the next doubling of the people of 
England will be in anout 600 years to come, or by the year 
of our Lord 2300; at which time it will have 11 millions of 
people; but that the next doubling after that will not be (in 
all probability) in less than 1200 or 1300 years more, or by 
the year of our Lord 3500 or 3600; at which time the king- 
dom will have 22 millions of souls, or four times its present 
number, in case the world should last so long; 


EARLY POPULATION THEORIES 13 


“Now, the kingdom containing but 39 millions of acres, 
it will then have less than two acres to each head, and con- 
_ sequently will not then be capable of any further increase. 

¢, . Whereby it appears that the increase of the king- 
dom being 880,000 people in the last 100 years, and 920,000 
in the next succeeding 100 years, the annual increase at this 
time is about 9000 souls per annum. But, whereas the yearly 
burials of the kingdom are about 1 in 32, or 170,000 souls; 
and the yearly births 1 in 28, or 190,000 souls, 

“Whereby the yearly increase should be 20,000 souls; 

“Tt is to noted, 


per annum. 
1. That the allowance for plagues and great mor- 
talities comes to, ata medium . : . 4000 
2. Foreign or civil wars, at a medium . : . 38500 
3. The sea, constantly employing about 40,000, pre- 
cipitates the death of about : ( . 2500 
4, The plantations (over and above the accession 
of foreigners) carry away . ; f . 1000 
In all . : : " ; 11,000 
Whereby the neat annual increase is but. . 9000 
Inall . : t : : 20,000” 


It will be seen that, if he was rather rash in his spec- 
ulations, Gregory King gave us some useful statistics 
for comparison with more recent times. We shall re- 
turn to these in a later chapter, devoting the rest of 
this to a glance at eighteenth-century population 
theories and the controversy which provoked Malthus 
to write his essay in 1798 


§ 6. The Forerunners of Malthus. Montesquieu made 
some shrewd observations on our subject in the twenty- 


14 POPULATION .| 


third book of L’Esprit des Lois, from which the follow- 
ing are extracted: 


“The females of brutes have an almost constant fecundity; 
but in the human species, the manner of thinking, the char- 
acter, the passions, the humour, the caprice, the idea of pre- 
serving beauty, the pain of childbearing and the fatigue of a 
too numerous family obstruct propagation in a thousand 
different ways.” 


On the other hand: 


“Wherever a place is found in which two persons can live 
commodiously, there they enter into marriage. Nature has 
a sufficient propensity to it, when unrestrained by the diffi- 
culty of subsistence. ... 

“A rising people increase and multiply extremely. This 
is because with them it would be a great inconvenience to 
live in celibacy and not to have many children; the contrary 
of which is the case when a nation is formed.” 


The possibility of over-population was clearly in- 
dicated by Montesquieu in the following passage: 


“There are countries in which nature does all; the legis- 
lator then has nothing to do. What need is there of inducing 
men by laws to propagation when a fruitful climate yields a 
sufficient number of inhabitants? Sometimes the climate is 
more favourable than the soil; the people multiply and are 
destroyed by famine; this is the casein China. Hencea father 
sells his daughter and exposes his children.” 


The Physiocrats, concentrating their attention upon 
the means by which the abject poverty of the French 
peasants could be alleviated, naturally rejected the 
“more the merrier”? doctrine which the courtiers of 
ambitious monarchs had as naturally adopted. In the 


EARLY POPULATION THEORIES 15 


latter half of the eighteenth century, therefore, the 
French economists were generally inclined to empha- 
_ size the dependence of the population upon the food 
supply, and to point out that improvements in the 
methods of agriculture must necessarily precede any 
healthy increase in the numbers of the people. 

This point of view was shared by various writers in 
Italy and Germany, but seems to have made so little 
impression in England that it came with the shock of 
novelty from the pen of Malthus. America was in ad- 
vance of England in this respect, for Benjamin Franklin, 
who was much influenced by the Physiocrats, published 
in 1751 his short Observations concerning the Increase 
of Mankind and the Peopling of Countries, in which 
some fundamental principles were clearly expounded. 
Europe, he said, was almost fully peopled and could 
therefore increase but little and slowly, but in America 
_ Jand was so cheap and plentiful that a laborer could in 
a short time accumulate enough to support and pro- 
vide for a family. Therefore ‘‘if it be reckoned there 
{in Europe] that there is but one marriage per annum 
among one hundred persons, perhaps we may reckon 
two; and if in Europe they have four births to a mar- 
riage (many of their marriages being late) we may 
reckon eight, of which, if one-half grow up, and our mar- 
rlages are made, reckoning one with another, at twenty 
years of age, our people must at least be doubled every 
twenty years.” ‘There is no bound,” said Franklin, 
“to the prolific nature of plants or animals, but 
what is made by their crowding and interfering with 
each other’s means of subsistence. Was the face of 
the earth vacant of other plants, it might be gradually 
sowed with one kind only, as, for instance, with fennel; 


16 POPULATION 


and were it empty of other inhabitants, it might in a 
few ages be replenished from one nation only, as, for 
instance, with Englishmen.” 

Not more than eighty thousand Englishmen had 
been taken to America, but by natural increase they 
amounted to more than a million in the middle of the 
eighteenth century. By doubling every twenty-five 
years—a, moderate estimate, Franklin thought, of the 
rate of increase—this million would in another entury 
result in a greater number of Englishmen in America 
than in the mother county. What an accession of 
power to the British Empire by sea as well as by land!”’ 

English writers were engaged at this time in a learned 
controversy concerning the relative density of popula- 
tion in ancient and modern times. Dr. Robert Wallace 
maintained the ‘‘superior populousness of antiquity” 
in a work published in 1753. David Hume replied to 
this in a Discourse concerning the populousness of An- 
tient Nations. Wallace rejoined in an appendix to his 
own book, but, according to M’Culloch, though he ‘‘suc- 
ceeded in pointing out a few errors in Hume’s state- 
ments, which were rectified in subsequent editions of 
the essay, he wholly failed to shake its foundations. 
or to prove in opposition to Hume that Europe was 
more populous in ancient than in modern times.”’ 

Other writers also took part in this discussion, and 
although the point at issue appears to be one of purely 
academic interest, it was mainly from these writings 
of Hume and Wallace that Malthus deduced his prin- 
ciple of population. 

In 1776 occurred the revolution in economic thought 
occasioned by the publication of The Wealth of Nations. 
Adam Smith did not deal systematically with popula- 


EARLY POPULATION THEORIES 17 


tion problems, but his references to them are very 
suggestive, and there is no doubt that he, too, helped 
‘.to inspire Malthus. In his chapter on the wages of 
labor he says: 


“Tt is not the actual greatness of national wealth, but its 
continual increase, which occasions a rise in the wages of 
labour. . . . The most decisive mark of the prosperity of any 
country is the increase of the number of its inhabitants. In 
Great Britain and most other European countries they are 
not supposed to double in less than five hundred years. In 
the British colonies in North America it has been found that 
they double in twenty or five-and-twenty years. Nor in the 
present times is this increase principally owing to the contin- 
ual importation of new inhabitants, but to the great multi- 
plication of the species. Those who live to an old age, it is 
said, frequently see there from fifty to a hundred, and some- 
times many more, descendants from their own body... . 

“Poverty, though it no doubt discourages, does not always 
prevent marriage. It seems even to be favourable to genera- 
tion. A half-starved Highland woman frequently bears more 
than twenty children, while a pampered fine lady is often 
incapable of bearing any, and is generally exhausted by two 
or three. ... 

“But poverty, though it does not prevent the generation, 
is extremely unfavourable to the rearing of children. The 
tender plant is produced; but in so cold a soil, and so severe 
- a climate, soon withers and dies. It is not uncommon, I have 
- been frequently told, in the Highlands of Scotland, for a 
mother who has borne twenty children not to have two alive. 

“Hivery species of animals naturally multiplies in propor- 
tion to the means of their subsistence, and no species can 
ever multiply beyond it. But in civilised society it is only 
among the inferior ranks of people that the scantiness of sub- 
sistence can set limits to the further multiplication of the 
human species; and it can do so in no other way than by de- 


is POPULATION 


stroying a great part of the children which their fruitful mar- 
riages produce.” 


In discussing the rent of land, Adam Smith observes 
that: 

“Countries are populous, not in proportion to the number 
of people whom their produce can clothe and lodge, but in 
proportion to that of those whom it can feed. When food is 
provided, it is easy to find the necessary clothing and lodging. 
But though these are at hand, it may often be difficult to 
find food. ... 

“But when, by the improvement and cultivation of land, 
the labour of one family can provide food for two, the la- 
bour of half the society becomes sufficient to provide food 
for the whole. The other half, therefore, or at least the 
greater part of them, can be employed in providing other 
things, or in satisfying the other wants and fancies of man- 
kind.” 

If Hume, Wallace and Adam Smith supplied Mal- 
thus with the materials from which he evolved his 
essay, William Godwin, the father-in-law of Shelley, 
performed the equally important service of provok- 
ing him to write it. Godwin was a philosophical Rad- 
ical, whose great work on political science, The Inquiry 
concerning Political Justice, and its Influence on Gen- 
eral Virtue and Happiness, had a considerable influence 
upon the advanced politicians of his day. The French 
Revolution, the ideas which caused it and the ideas 
which were caused by it, had produced a school of op- 
timism that was entirely new. A belief in progress, in 
the practicability of transforming men into angels and 
the world into a paradise, spread rapidly from France 
to England. Those who resisted the new idea seemed 
to do so because they clung to old privileges and abuses 


EARLY POPULATION THEORIES 19 


rather than through honest doubt. Wisdom and en- 
lightenment were apparently on the side of the Radi- 
cals. Godwin was a disciple of Condorcet and. believed 
in the perfectibility of man. The characters of 
men were blanks, he held, which their external cir- 
cumstances. and, above ail, political institutions, filled 
in. Government was a necessary evil, perpetuated 
“by the infantine and uninstructed confidence of the 
many.” Private property in the labor of others was un- 
just; the goal must be complete equality of conditions. 

This belief in equality and perfectibility brought 
Godwin, as it had brought Condorcet, to consider 
whether the pressure of population upon the means 
of subsistence might not prove an insurmountable 
obstacle. He rashly answered with the conjecture 
that passion between the sexes may one day be extin- 
guished, and that, anyway, ‘‘to reason thus is to foresee 
difficulties at a great distance. Three-fourths of the 
habitable globe is now uncultivated. The parts already 
cultivated are capable of immeasurable improvement. 
Myriads of centuries of still increasing population may 
pass away, and the earth be still found sufficient for 
- the subsistence of its inhabitants.”’ 

This utterance sealed the fate of Wiliam Godwin. 
“Malthus,” wrote Sydney Smith, a few years later, 
_ “took the trouble of refuting him, and we hear no more 


~ of Mr. Godwin.” 


An account of the restrictive practices of primitive com- 
munities is given in The Population Problem by A. M. Carr- 
Saunders. 


Early population theories are collected and summarized in 
Pre-Malthusian Doctrines of Population by C. E. Stangeland. 


CHAPTER II 
MALTHUS 


‘When goods increase, they are increased that eat them.’ 
Ecclestastes v. 11. 


§ 1. An Essay on the Principle of Population. Thomas 
Robert Malthus was the son of an English country 
gentleman who had been the friend and executor of 
Rousseau and held advanced political opinions. God- 
win’s utopian communism inspired the elder Mal- 
thus with all the enthusiasm that a kindly man can 
feel for a doctrine which promises untold happiness 
to future generations without in the least interfer- 
ing with his own present comfort. The son, however, 
though he was not lacking in sympathy for the ideals 
which accompanied the French Revolution, had not, 
he said, “acquired that command over his understand- 
ing, which would enable him to believe what he wishes, 
without evidence, or to refuse his assent to what might 
be unpleasing, when accompanied with evidence.” 
There was thus a difference in point of view between 
the father and the son which led to endless arguments, 
or perhaps to the repetition of one unending argument 
in various disguises. The publication by William 
Godwin of a book called The Enquirer supplied fresh 
fuel to the fire, and the debate blazed up, in 1797, so 
that Malthus found it necessary to resort to pen and 
ink in order to state his thoughts in a clearer manner 
20 


MALTHUS 21 


than he could do in conversation. “But as the sub- 
ject opened upon him, some ideas occurred which he 
did not recollect to have met with before; and as he 
conceived that every, the least light, on a topic so gen- 
erally interesting, might be received with candour, he 
determined to put his thoughts in a form for publica- 
tion.’’.* ) 

The result of this determination was An Essay on 
the Principle of Population as it affects the future im- 
provement of society, with remarks on the speculations 
of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet and other writers, published 
anonymously in 1798. The book had a splendid 
reception. Within five years more than twenty replies 
to it had appeared in print, and the matter had been 
fully argued in periodicals and parliamentary speeches. 
Pitt dropped his Bill to amend the Poor Law in defer- 
ence to the objections of ‘‘those whose opinions he was 
bound to respect,”’ meaning Bentham and Malthus. 
In short, Malthus found himself in the center of a tre- 
mendous controversy, and he determined to go more 
deeply into the subject, in order to support his argu- 
ment by a formidable array of illustrations, drawn 
from ‘‘the best authenticated accounts that we have 
of the state of other countries.’”’ Thus the second edi- 
tion of the Essay, published in 1803, differed in many 
respects from the first edition. The essence of the ar- 
‘gument remained unchanged, except m one respect, 
which will be mentioned later, but it was very differ- 
ently dressed. The version published in 1798 was a 
tour de force, full of striking metaphors and original 
thought; the later version was a scientific treatise, 


1 Malthus. Preface to first edition of the Essay. 


22 POPULATION 


four times the length, infinitely duller, and “‘one of the 
most crushing answers that patient and hard-working 
science has ever given to the reckless assertions of its 
adversaries.” The root of the matter will be found in 
the first two chapters of the Essay, which everyone 
should read for himself. 


§ 2. The Malthusian Argument. The argument may 
be summarized as follows: 

2“Through the animal and vegetable kingdoms Na- 
ture has scattered the seeds of life abroad with the most 
profuse and liberal hand; but has been comparatively 
sparing in the room and nourishment necessary to 
rear them... . The race of plants and the race of ani- 
mals shrink under this great restrictive law; and man 
cannot by any efforts of reason escape from it.”’ Thus, 
population has a constant tendency to increase be- 
yond the means of subsistence. If the supply of food 
were unlimited, the number of human beings would 
double in less than twenty-five years (as the popula- 
tion of North America had actually done apart from 
immigration, for a century and a half), and go on dou- 
bling itself four times in each century, or in other words, 
increase In a geometrical ratio. On the other hand, 
the produce of this island could hardly be doubled in — 
the next twenty-five years and it certainly could not 
be quadrupled in fifty years. ‘‘Let us suppose that 
the yearly additions which might be made to the for- 
mer produce, instead of decreasing, which they cer- 
tainly would do, were to remain the same; and that 


1 Marshall, The Economics of Industry, 1879, p. 30. 


2 The passages in inverted commas are quoted verbatim from 
Malthus. 


MALTHUS 23 


the produce of this island might be increased every 
twenty-five years by a quantity equal to what it at 
present produces. The most enthusiastic speculator 
cannot suppose a greater increase than this. In a few 
centuries it would make every acre of land in the is- 
land like a garden.”’ It is clear, then, that “‘the means 
of subsistence . . . could not possibly be made to in- 
crease faster than in an arithmetical ratio. .. . 

“The necessary effects of these two different rates 
of increase when brought together will be very strik- 
ing. ...’ Taking the whole earth, and thereby, of 
course, excluding emigration, ‘‘the human _ species 
would increase as the numbers 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 
64, 128, 256, and subsistence as 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 
9. In-two centuries the population would be to the 
means of subsistence as 256 to 9; in three centuries as 
4096 to 13, and in two thousand years the difference 
would be almost incalculable. 

“In this supposition no limits whatever are placed 
to the produce of the earth. It may increase for ever 
and be greater than any assignable quantity; yet still 
the power of population being in every period so much 
superior, the increase of the human species can only 
be kept down to the level of the means of subsistence 
by the constant operation of the strong law of necessity, 
acting as a check upon the greater power. 

“The ultimate check to population appears then to 
be a want of food, arising necessarily from the differ- 
ent ratios according to which population and food in- 
crease. But this ultimate check is never the immedi- 
ate check, except in cases of actual famine. 

“The immediate check may be stated to consist in 
all those customs, and all those diseases, which seem 


24 POPULATION 


to be generated by a scarcity of the means of subsist- 
ence; and all those causes, independent of this scar- 
city, whether of a moral or physical nature, which 
tend prematurely to weaken and destroy the human 
frame. 

‘“These checks to population, which are constantly 
operating with more or less force in every society .. . 
may be classed under two general heads—the prevent- 
- ive and the positive checks. 

“The preventive check, as far as it is voluntary, is 
peculiar to man.”’ Unlike plants and animals, man is 
apt to consider whether he will be able to support his 
offspring before he brings them into the world. ‘In 
a state of equality, if such can exist, this would be the 
simple question. In the present state of society, other 
considerations occur. Will he not lower his rank in 
life, and be obliged to give up in great measure his 
former habits? . . . Will he not at any rate subject him- 
self to greater difficulties and more severe labor, than 
in his single state? Will he not be unable to transmit 
to his children the same advantages of education and 
improvement that he had himself possessed?’”’ May 
he not even be reduced to poverty “and obliged to the 
sparing hand of Charity for support? 

“These considerations are calculated to prevent, 
and certainly do prevent, a great number of persons 
in all civilized nations from pursuing the dictate of 
nature in an early attachment to one woman. If this 
restraint do not produce vice, it is undoubtedly the 
least evil that can arise from the principle of popula- 
tion. .. . When this restraint produces vice, the evils 
which follow are but too conspicuous... . 

“The positive checks to population include... all 


MALTHUS 25 


unwholesome occupations, severe labor and exposure 
to the seasons, extreme poverty, bad nursing of chil- 
‘dren, great towns, excesses of all kinds, the whole train 
of common diseases and epidemics, wars, plague and 
famine... .” 

These checks to population, both preventive and posi- 
tive, are “all resolvable into moral restraint, vice and 
misery.” (The addition of ‘moral restraint” to the 
two other factors of “‘vice’”’ and ‘‘misery”’ constituted 
the one important change in the argument of the essay 
when it developed into the weighty second edition. It 
transformed the “principle of population’’ from an 
inexorable decree of unending misery for the human 
race into a danger which man could avoid altogether 
by the exercise of a proper sense of his responsibility 
for his actions.) 

“Of the preventive checks, the restraint from mar- 
riage which is not followed by irregular gratifications 
may properly be termed moral restraint. ... Of the 
positive checks, those which appear to arise unavoid- 
ably from the laws of nature, may be called exclusively 
misery; and those which we obviously bring upon our- 
selves, such as wars, excesses and many others which 
it would be in our power to avoid, are of a mixed na- 
ture. They are brought upon us by vice, and their 
- consequences are misery.... 

“The preventive and positive checks must vary 
inversely as each other; that is, in countries either 
naturally unhealthy or subject to a great mortality, 
from whatever cause it may arise, the preventive check 
will prevail very little. In those countries, on the 
contrary, which are naturally healthy, and where the 
preventive check is found to prevail with considerable 


26 POPULATION 


force, the positive check will prevail very little, or the 
mortality be very small. 

“In every country some of these checks are in con- 
stant operation, yet... there are few states in which 
there is not a constant effort in the population to in- 
crease beyond the means of subsistence,’”’ which ‘‘tends 
to subject the lower classes of society to distress, and 
to prevent any great permanent melioration of their 
condition.” 

To sum up: 


“1. Population is necessarily limited by the means 
of subsistence. 

‘2. Population invariably increases where the means 
of subsistence increase, unless prevented by 
some very powerful and obvious checks. 

“*3. These checks, and the checks which repress the 
superior power of population, and keep its 
effects on a level with the means of subsistence, 
are all resolvable into moral restraint, vice and 
misery.” 


“The first of these propositions,’’ said Malthus, 
“scarcely needs illustration. ‘The second and third 
will sufficiently be established by a review of the im- 
mediate checks to population in the past and present 
state of society.” 

This review occupies the remainder of the first, and 
the whole of the second, of the four books into which 
the essay is divided. In the light of the facts revealed 
therein, Malthus then resumes his general argument 
with a pointed question: ‘‘ Whatever was the original 
number of British emigrants which increased so fast 
in North America, let us ask, Why does not an equal 


MALTHUS 27 


number produce an equal increase in the same time 
in Great Britain?”’ ‘The obvious reason,” he answers, 
“is the want of food; and that this want is the most 
efficient cause of the three immediate checks to pop- 
ulation, which have been observed to prevail in all so- 
cieties, is evident from the rapidity with which even 
old states recover from the desolations of war, pesti- 
lence, famine and the convulsions of nature.’’ 


“Other circumstances being the same,” he adds, a few 
pages later, “it may be affirmed that countries are populous 
according to the quantity of human food which they produce 
or can acquire; and happy according to the liberality with 
which this food is divided, or the quantity which a day’s la- 
bour will purchase. Corn countries are more populous than 
pasture countries, and rice countries more populous than corn 
countries. But their happiness does not depend either upon 
their being thinly or fully inhabited, upon their poverty or 
their riches, their youth or their age; but on the proportion 
which the population and the food bear to each other... . 

“Tt is probable that the food of Great Britain is divided 
in more liberal shares to her inhabitants at the present pe- 
riod than it was two thousand, three thousand, or four thou- 
sand years ago. And it has appeared that the poor and thinly- 
inhabited tracts of the Scotch Highlands are more distressed 
by a redundant population than the most populous parts of 
Europe.” 


This was Malthus’s Principle of Population. What 
did it add to the sum of human knowledge? The idea 
that human beings might become so numerous that 
the earth could not produce sufficient food for their 
support had been familiar, as we have seen in Chapter 
I, to various writers at different periods in history. In- 
deed, it is self-evident. I do not much see,” said Haz- 


ee 


28 POPULATION 


litt, “‘what there is to discover on the subject, after 
reading the genealogical table of Noah’s descendants, 
and knowing that the world is round.” Malthus ad- 
mitted that the subject had been ably treated by earlier 
writers, but he claimed to have made the comparison be- 
tween the increase of population and food with greater — 
force and precision. The precision, however, was 
more apparent than real. When he said that popula- 
tion, if unchecked, would increase in a geometrical 
ratio, whereas subsistence cannot increase in more 
than an arithmetical ratio, Malthus appeared to be 
making effective use of his mathematical knowledge. 
(He was ninth wrangler at Cambridge.) In fact, he was 
stating his case badly. ‘For every mouth, God sends 
a pair of hands,” and if, as Malthus supposed, ‘‘the 
human species would, if unchecked, increase as the 
numbers 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, and subsistence 
as the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9”’ it would fol- 
low that an addition of 128 workers in the period 2000- 
2025 would have a total productive value equal to that 
of only one additional worker in the period 1800-1825. 
This in spite of all the improvements in the methods 
of cultivation which might have been evolved in 175 
years! There is nothing in the essay, except an ap- 
peal to “the known qualities of land”’ to establish the 
truth of this statement, or indeed to show conclusively 
that the hands which normally accompany each mouth 
could not make the earth yield the subsistence for an 
indefinite increase in population. 


§ 3. The Law of Diminishing Returns.. Unfortunately 
for the human race, the essential validity of the Mal- 
thusian principle of population is not destroyed by the 


MALTHUS 29 


substitution of an accurate account of the growth of 
the food supply for the fallacious arithmetical ratio. 
- Turgot stated the truth of this matter quite clearly 
when Malthus was two years old; Malthus himself 
showed that he understood it in his later writings, and 
Ricardo and Mill elaborated it in what is called The 
Law of Diminishing Returns. 

This law arises out of the peculiarity of land from 
an economic standpoint, to which attention was called 
in the first volume of this series. It is unlike capital or 
labor in that its supply is, broadly speaking, fixed and 
unalterable. An increase in population implies an in- 
crease in the supply of labor. The supply of capital 
will probably expand at least proportionately to the 
increase in population. But the supply of land remains 
unchanged. 

At certain periods in history this characteristic of 
_ land was probably unimportant to mankind. Nobody 
wanted to increase the supply of land when there was 
room enough and to spare for all. When ‘‘ Abram was 
very rich in cattle. .. . And Lot also, which went with 
Abram, had flocks, and herds, and tents. ... And 
the land was not able to bear them that they might 
dwell together: for their substance was great so that 
they could not dwell together,” they had only to walk 
off in different directions and all was well, unless they 
chanced to come in conflict with other tribes. But 
in the modern world, the herdsman and the shep- 
herd have to compete for land, not only with other 
herdsmen and shepherds, but, in many places, with 
the grower of wheat and other crops, and even with 
the builder of houses and factories. Thus, as the 
population increases the demand for land increases, 


30 POPULATION 


and, the supply being fixed, men are obliged to study 
the means by which they can bring new and presum- 
ably inferior land into cultivation, or get an ever-in- 
creasing quantity of produce from the same quantity 
of land. There are two ways in which this can be done. 
The first is by discovering and applying improved 
methods of production. The second is by using in- 
creasing quantities of the other agents of production; 
capital and labor. The discovery of better methods of 
production is obviously a variable and incalculable 
factor in the problem; but experience has shown that 
certain definite results may be anticipated from the 
application, in any given stage of agricultural knowl- 
edge and skill, of steadily increasing quantities of cap- 
ital and labor to the unexpanding earth. 
Turgot said: 


“Seed thrown on a soil naturally fertile but totally un- 
prepared would be expenditure almost entirely wasted. If 
the ground were once tilled the produce would be greater; 
tilling it a second and a third time, might not merely double 
and triple, but quadruple or decuple the produce, which will 
thus augment in a much larger proportion than the expendi- 
ture, and that up to a certain point, at which the produce 
will be as great as possible compared with the expenditure. 
Past this point, if the expenditure be still increased, the prod- 
uce will still increase, but less and less, and always less and 
less, until the fecundity of the earth being exhausted, and 
art being unable to do anything further, an addition to the 
expenditure will add nothing whatever to the produce.” 4 


On the basis of this experience, which is confirmed 
by every farmer, it is customary to say that when suc- 
cessive doses of capital and labor are applied to land, 


1 Quoted by Cannan, Wealth, p. 60. 


MALTHUS ol 


increasing returns to each dose are first obtained, but 
that after a certain point has been reached, diminish- 
ing returns to each subsequent dose inevitably fol- 
low, unless an improvement is made in the methods 
of agriculture. Moreover, in old countries, practically 
all the land has been worked at least as thoroughly as is 
necessary in order to reach the point at which the max- 
imum returns are obtained; and it is therefore broadly 
true to say that, unless better methods of cultivation 
are used an increase in the cayrial and labor applied 
an the cultivation of land causes a less than proportionate 
ancrease in the amount of produce raised. This state- 
ment is called the Law of Diminishing Returns. 

If we now substitute the Law of Diminishing Re- 
turns in agriculture for the arithmetical ratio of Mal- 
thus’s Essay, we shall see that the conclusion remains 
unchanged. “It is vain to say that all mouths which 
the increase of mankind calls into existence bring with 
them hands. The new mouths require as much food 
as the old ones, and the hands do not produce as 
much.” ? . Population must still press upon the means 
of subsistence unless the checks of vice, misery or moral 
restraint intervene. 

Reconsidering the Principle of Population in the 
light of Diminishing Returns, it is important to note 
the emphasis which Malthus placed upon the constant 
operation of the checks to population which arise out 
of a want of food. This was perhaps his most solid 
contribution towards an understanding of factors which 
limit the number of human beings upon the earth. 
Hume, Wallace, Condorcet and even Godwin had 


1J.S. Mill, Principles, Book I, Chap. XIII, § 2. . 


32 POPULATION 


written of the danger of over-population, but they had 
regarded it as an evil which might arise in a more or 
less remote future. Malthus pointed out that the 
population was constantly held in check, at all times 
and in all countries, by the evils which arose, directly 
or indirectly, from pressure upon the food supply. If 
people refrained from having children because they 
had insufficient means to support a family, or if chil- 
dren died in infancy from diseases caused by mal-nu- 
trition, the population was being kept down by want 
of food, though no one might die of starvation. “A 
man who is locked up in a room,” said Malthus, ‘‘may 
fairly be said to be confined by the walls of it, though 
he may never touch them.’’ Even so was the human 
race confined to the numbers which the world’s produce 
would support at any given time. Unless we deliber- 
ately restricted our numbers, they would be kept down 
by the powerful checks which he described. This was 
the point that Hazlitt overlooked when he made his 
joke about ‘‘the genealogical table of Noah’s descend- 
ants,’ and it is not infrequently overlooked by more 
serious critics of the Malthusian doctrine. 


§ 4. The Relevance of the Malthusian Argument to pres- 
ent Circumstances. In the days of Malthus each coun- 
try was practically a self-contained and self-supporting 
community. In England the Industrial Revolution 
had begun. Its disturbing influence contributed to the 
misery and discontent which Malthus saw around 
him. The spinning jenny came into use in the same 
year in which the essay was first published. Cart- 
wright’s loom began to be used in 1801. But it was not 
until 1838 that the first commercial steamer crossed 


MALTHUS Ae BS 


the Atlantic, and not until about 1870 that the full 
effect of inventions and international trade had worked 
itself out in the world-wide division of labor. Goods 
can now be brought from the most distant countries 
more cheaply and almost as quickly as they could be 
carried from London to Cornwall in the time of Mal- 
thus. The population of Great Britain and Ireland was 
16,000,000 in 1801, and 41,500,000 in 1901. Total Brit- 
ish imports and exports were £37,000,000 in 1791, 
and £870,000,000 in 1901. The population problem 
with which Malthus was especially concerned, the 
problem of feeding a rapidly increasing number of 
Englishmen on the produce of an island which re- 
mained the same size, was solved, for a hundred 
years at least, by an immense increase in the pro- 
duction of manufactures and the exchange of these 
for food and raw materials from new continents. 
As numbers increased food actually became cheaper; 
more emigrants were available to grow food abroad, 
and more workmen were absorbed. in Europe in the 
production of the agricultural machinery, steamers 
and railways which enabled the food to be produced 
and carried home for their consumption. During the 
latter half of the nineteenth century, a unit of labor 
applied to industry in Europe could be exchanged for 
a steadily increasing quantity of food. 

-_ It would’seem, at first sight, that the teaching of 
Malthus could have little relevance to the problems 
of the twentieth century. Fundamentally, however, 
the issue remains the same. How is the population of 
the world to be restrained from increasing faster than 
the world’s food supply, except by the evil checks 
enumerated by Malthus? 


34 POPULATION 


The teeming population of Europe does not produce 
nearly as much food as it consumes; it is dependent 
upon the resources of the New World. But the New 
World is no longer wholly dependent upon Europe for 
its manufactures. It produces them itself in increas- 
ing quantities. 

Population is growing in the food-producing coun- 
tries. The United States, which is one of the chief 
sources from which Europe draws her food, now con- 
sumes more than three-fourths of the wheat she pro- 
duces. It is true that the food-producing area of the 
world may still be greatly extended; but this will only 
be done under the stimulus of a rise in the price of prod- 
uce. This means that, in all probability, diminishing 
returns in food will in future be obtained for each 
successive dose of capital and labor applied in industry. 

The position with regard to the raw materials of 
European industry, in so far as these are products of 
the soil, is very like that of the food supply. The pro- 
duction of cotton, for instance, has not kept pace with 
the world’s requirements. Since about 1900 a consid- 
erable increase in price has been needed to enable the 
supply of cotton to equal the demand for it, and it is 
anticipated that a further rise in price will be neces- 
sary to call forth any substantial increase in the 
quantity produced. Here, again, we may see the Law 
of Diminishing Returns at work. 

Other raw materials of industry, such as coal and 
iron, are in a different category. These minerals are in 
the nature of stored-up capital. The yield from mines 
is like the yield from lands which have been for some 
time under cultivation, in that each additional dose 
of capital and labor applied to the extraction of min- 


MALTHUS 30 


-erals will produce a smaller proportionate return than 
the last preceding dose, unless some improvement 
_ takes place in the arts of mining. But the produce of 
a mine is part of a fixed stock. Once a vein has given 
up its treasure, it can produce no more; whereas a 
properly cultivated field retains its fertility, and yields 
a constantly recurring income. When, therefore, a 
country like Great Britain finds itself, by the inter- 
national division of labor, in the position of exchanging 
minerals, and the goods manufactured from minerals, 
for the raw products of distant lands, an anxious ques- 
tion arises as to whether the process can indefinitely 
continue. A country which possessed a monopoly of 
an absolutely indispensable mineral would no doubt 
be in a strong position. By husbanding her resources 
she might extract an enormous tribute from the rest 
of the world. But even a unique commodity like Welsh 
steam coal has to compete in the world’s markets with 
other fuels such as oil. It is not indispensable. 

From the point of view of the human race as a whole, 
it is comforting to know that science is perfecting other 
devices, such as water-power, to carry on the work of 
the world when the coal supply is exhausted. Man- 
kind may not be forced to return to the primitive meth- 
ods of hand-labor. Particular nations, however, which 
have built up great industries and become densely 
populated through a differential advantage over other 
nations in the possession of mineral wealth, are faced 
by the possibility of losing that advantage, and being 
- forced to compete for their share of the world’s food 
supply with the handicap against them. 

The law of diminishing returns is not, of course, a 
force which exerts itself suddenly with catastrophic 


36 POPULATION 


effects. The period of abundant supplies, resulting 
from the development of vast food-producing areas, 
fades almost imperceptibly into a period of relative 
' searcity. Ifthe organization of European life had not 
been torn asunder by the war, the tendencies out- 
lined in the preceding paragraphs, vaguely menacing 
the future well-being of Europe’s population, would 
not yet have been noticed by practical men. Improve- 
ments in the organization of industry in Europe may 
so increase productive power that no falling off in the 
general well-being need result from an increase in the 
cost of food. It is even possible that improvements 
in the arts of agriculture may still for a time keep pace 
with the growth of population, and that food may re- 
main as cheap and plentiful in the immediate future 
as it has been in the last fifty years. Nevertheless, the 
tendency for population to outrun the means of sub- 
sistence is a potent fact in the life of humanity. The 
number of people in the world has increased greatly 
during an exceptional period in economic history. 
Some of the factors which made that increase pos- 
sible appear to bave run their course; others are be- 
ginning to show signs of exhaustion. If population 
continues to increase ‘‘in geometrical ratio,”’ a decline 
in the general standard of life seems well-nigh inevita- 
ble. Buta decline in the general standard of life means 
want and misery and suffering for the majority of 
human beings. Is there no other hope? Let us turn 
again to Malthus and see what light he can throw upon 
the matter. 


§ 5. An Important Development. On the evidence be- 
fore him, it was natural that Malthus should take a 


MALTHUS ~ 37 


gloomy view of the prospects of mankind. The infor- 
mation he collected seemed to show that in all coun- 
tries at all times population rapidly increased up to 
the means of subsistence, and that the lower classes 
were consequently always living on the verge of des- 
titution. In England, at the time when he was writ- 
ing, a number of causes had combined “to bring the 
working classes into the greatest misery they have ever 
suffered, at all events since the beginning of trust- 
worthy records of English social history.’? + And their 
pastors and masters were still exhorting them to “in- 
crease and multiply’?! Nevertheless, Malthus was 
not without hope that conditions might be improved: 


“The object of those who really wish to better the condi- 
tion of the lower classes of society,”’ he said, ‘‘must be to 
raise the relative proportion between the price of labour and 
the price of provisions, so as to enable the labourer to com- 
mand a larger share of the necessaries and comforts of life. 
In an endeavour to raise the proportion of the quantity of 
provisions to the number of consumers in any country, our 
attention would naturally be first directed to the increasing 
of the absolute quantity of provisions; but finding that, as 
fast as we did this, the number of consumers more than kept: 
pace with it, and that with all our exertions we were still as 
far as ever behind, we should be convinced that our efforts 
directed only in this way would never succeed. It would ap- 
- pear to be setting the tortoise to catch the hare. Finding, 
therefore, that from the laws of nature we could not propor- 
tion the food to the population, our next attempt should nat- 
urally be to proportion the population to the food. If we 
can persuade the hare to go to sleep, the tortoise may. have 
some chance of overtaking her. 

“We are not, however, to relax our efforts in increasing 


1 Marshall, Principles of Economics, Book IV, Chap. IV, § 2. 


38 POPULATION 


the quantity of provisions, but to combine another effort 
with it; that of keeping the population, when once it has 
been overtaken, at such a distance behind as to effect the 
relative proportion which we desire; and thus unite the two 
grand desiderata, a greet actual population and a state of 
society in which abject poverty and dependence are com- 
paratively but little known; two objects which are far from 
being incompatible.” 1 


There is more reason now than there was when the 
above passage was written to think that the hare may 
be persuaded to go to sleep. Malthus firmly refused 
to entertain mere conjectures: 


“A writer may tell me,” he said, ‘‘that he thinks man will 
ultimately become an ostrich. I cannot properly contradict 
him. But before he can expect to bring any reasonable per- 
son over to his opinion, he ought to show that the necks of 
mankind have been gradually elongating; that the lips have 
grown harder, and more prominent; that the legs and feet 
are daily altering their shape; and that the hair is beginning 
to change into stubs of feathers. And till the probability 
of so wonderful a conversion can be shown, it is surely lost 
time and lost eloquence to expatiate on the happiness of 
man in such a state... .’2 


Well, we have evidence to-day, of the kind that Mal- 
thus properly demanded, that there is a tendency for 
men deliberately to restrict the number of their chil- 
dren, with a view to maintaining a certain standard 
of well-being and happiness. It is only a tendency 
at present, but it is a significant tendency. In France, 
the population is stationary. In Great Britain the 


1 Hssay, Book IV, Chap. III. 
2 Hssay, first edition, Chap. I. 


MALTHUS 39 


birth-rate has rapidly declined during the last half 
century, and a similar tendency has manifested itself 
in most Western countries. There is no doubt that 
this change is mainly due to what is called “birth 
control,’ the conscious limitation by married people 
of the size of their families. So far, the colored 
races, with the possible exception of Japan, have not 
adopted birth control. Moreover, in those countries 
where its influence is already perceptible, the richer 
classes are at present more affected by it than their 
poorer neighbors. Thus this new check to population 
may be said to be beginning at the wrong end of hu- 
man society, and restricting the families of those who 
could best afford to multiply. The importance of this 
aspect of the subject will be discussed in a later chapter. 
Here it is only necessary to note a new development 
which may enable the population to adjust itself to 
changing circumstances without suffering the degrad- 
ing miseries of privation. 


CHAPTER III 


POPULATION THEORIES IN CHANGING CIR- 
CUMSTANCES 


“For man also knoweth not his time: as the fishes that 
are taken in an evil net, and as the birds that are caught 
in the snare; so are the sons of men snared in an evil time, 
when it falleth suddenly upon them.” 3 

Ecclestastes ix, 12. 


§1. Why Malthus had many Disciples. Very few books 
have the distinction of being so fully discussed at the 
time they are first published as was Malthus’s Essay. 
Tories like Southey vied with Radicals like Godwin and 
Hazlitt, and revolutionaries like Cobbett, in the vio- 
lence of their attacks upon the book and its author. 
It was said by the same critics that the doctrine was 
obvious, that it wasn’t true, and that Malthus didn’t 
discover it. The Tory opposition was based on the 
feeling that the ordering of the universe by Providence 
was being criticised. But it was Godwin, the Free- 
thinker, who quoted texts from the Bible against “ Par- 
son Malthus,”’ and Cobbett who invented that name 
for him. 

In spite of, or perhaps because of these attacks, the 
Essay was very widely accepted among the Whigs 
and Utilitarians. Pitt, as we have seen, was much im- 
pressed by it. Paley was a distinguished convert. 
Senior, Ricardo and Whitbread all supported Mal- 
thus. So did James Mill, of whom Leslie Stephen 

40 


POPULATION THEORIES 4] 


says that “he ultimately became the father of nine 
children, an oversight for which his eldest son apol- 
—ogises.”’ On the whole it may be said that the Principle 
of Population received the assent, during the lifetime 
of its author, of most reasonable men, with some ad- 
ditional support from men of property who were glad 
to throw upon the poor the whole responsibility for 
their poverty, and to be satisfied that nothing could 
be done for them while they remained so improvi- 
dent as to marry and beget children. 

How, then, are we to account for the fact that this 
doctrine which achieved such prominence at the be- 
ginning of the nineteenth century, gradually slipped 
out of men’s minds and, without being superseded or 
controverted, was almost forgotten a hundred years 
later? The answer to this question is to be found in 
the economic developments of the period. 

We saw in the first chapter of this handbook that 
population theories, not only the ignorant prejudices 
of the ordinary man, but the considered opinions of 
philosophers and statesmen, could generally be asso- 
ciated with the temporary circumstances of the coun- 
tries in which the theorists lived. Plato and Aristotle 
approached the question from the point of view of the 

City State, and consequently recommended a station- 
ary population; the Romans, with the world at their 
feet, desired an ever-increasing supply of citizens; the 
Elizabethans, face to face with an immense problem 
_ of poverty and destitution, the result of many causes— 
the inclosing of land for pasture, the dissolution of 
monasteries, the debasing of the currency and the de-. 
cay of the guilds—were fully alive to the dangers of 
over-population; while the Mercantilist writers of the 


42 POPULATION 


seventeenth and eighteenth centuries all favored the 
greatest possible numbers as a means to national power; 
their cry was “ Population, population! Population at 
all events!” ? 

This relation between doctrines of population and 
the conditions under which they are formulated can — 
be traced in more recent controversies at least as clearly 
as in earlier times. F.S. Nitti contrasting ? the optimism 
of Adam Smith with the pessimism of Malthus, attrib- 
utes the difference in outlook between the two to 
the events which took place in the twenty years which 
intervened between the publication of The Wealth of 
Nations in 1776 and that of Malthus’s Essay. In that 
period, England experienced a succession of bad har- 
vests, the effects of which were aggravated by an ex- 
hausting war and the dislocating influence of the in- 
dustrial revolution. The average price of wheat in 
the decade 1771-1780 was 34/7; in 1781-1790 it was 
37/1; in 1791-1800 it was 63/6; in 1801-1810 it was 
83/11; and in 1811-1820 it was 87/6. Moreover, as 
in the crowded days of Elizabeth, the inclosing of 
common land and a disastrous Poor Law vastly in- 
creased the number of the destitute. 

Malthus has told us that he wrote his book because 
he had an argument with his father about Godwin’s 
views on the perfectibility of man. ‘The first edition 
of the Essay was indeed manifestly designed to com- 
bat the theories, which became so popular during the 
French Revolution, as to the infinite potentialities of 
the human race. By the time he reached his second 
edition, however, Malthus was more concerned to 


1 Joseph Townsend, Dissertation on the Poor Laws, 1786. 
2 Population and the Social System. 


POPULATION THEORIES 43 


throw light upon the cause of the poverty and distress 
of his fellow-countrymen than to pursue an abstract 
argument. Moreover, if it had not in fact dealt with 
a problem about which all thoughtful men were agi- 
tated, it is probable that the first anonymous essay 
would have passed unnoticed, and that the later tome 
would never have been written. So we may take it 
that the Malthusian Principle of Population was 
enunciated because England was (at least in a narrow 
sense) over-populated at the end of the eighteenth 
century. 


§ 2. How Diminishing Returns revealed themselves. The 
formulation of the tendency to diminishing returns 
arose even more directly out of the social and political 
conditions of England at the end of the Napoleonic 
Wars. The high price of corn had given rise to a great 
extension of cultivation and to improved methods. 
The Corn Laws probably had very little to do with 
the high prices, but landlords and farmers of course 
desired the high prices to continue, and urged Parlia-~ 
ment to restrict imports. ‘The Commons and the Lords 
both appointed Committees which reported in favor 
of a protectionist policy, and it was in the course of 
criticizing these Reports that Edward West, Malthus ? 
and Ricardo stated the tendency to diminishing re- 
turns and drew inferences from it: To them the case 
was perfectly clear. They had seen the tendency at 
work. 


1 Malthus was a protectionist, but he could not swallow all the 
arguments of the landlords. There is an excellent account of 
the controversy in Cannan’s Theories of Production and Distribu- 
tion, Chap. V. 


44 POPULATION 


“With every increase of capital and population,’ 
wrote Ricardo, “food will generally rise, on account 
of its being more difficult to produce.” 


“The division of labour and application of machinery,” 
said Edward West, “‘render labour more and more produc- 
tive in manufactures, in the progress of improvement; the 
same causes tend also to make labour more and more pro- 
ductive in agriculture in the progress of improvement. But 
another cause, namely, the necessity of having recourse to 
land inferior to that already in tillage, or of cultivating the 
same land more expensively, tends to make labour in agri- 
culture less productive in the progress of improvement. And 
the latter cause more than counteracts the effects of machin- 
ery and the division of labour in agriculture.” 


Thus, there are two opposing tendencies in produc- 
tion. On the one hand, there is the tendency for each 
successive dose of capital and labor to facilitate im- 
provements in organization and so to yield increasing 
returns. On the other hand, there is the tendency, 
discussed in the last chapter, for nature to yield dimin- 
ishing returns. Both these tendencies showed them- 
selves very clearly in England during the first half 
of the nineteenth century. By 1815 the power loom 
was coming into general use, enabling the weavers to 
keep pace with the spinners, whose jenny had been 
worked by water-power for some years before that date. 
In 1740, about a million and a half pounds of cotton 
was imported, in 1815 nearly one hundred millions. 
In 1742, about 100,000 pieces of cloth were milled in 
Yorkshire, in 1815 the number had risen to 500,000, 
and each piece was double the former length. Coal, 
iron and transport developed in an equally amazing 
way; while the population, fully justifying the faith of 


POPULATION THEORIES 45 


Malthus, increased in the industrial North by 75 per 
cent between 1801 and 1821. 

The very magnitude of these developments involved 
the working classes in misery and discontent. The 
population of England was on the move, and the proc- 
ess created an ‘economic friction” of a very painful 
_ kind. The price of food rose alarmingly, and wages 
lagged drearily behind. Adult labor was displaced to a 
considerable extent by child-labor in the factories and 
mines; and the misapplication of the lazssez-faire doc- 
trine aggravated the distress and fomented the dis- 
content. 


§ 3. Reaction against Malthus and Ricardo. By degrees, 
however, England recovered its equilibrium, and voices 
began’ to make themselves heard, saying that there was, 
after all, no tendency to diminishing returns. James 
Mill, M’Culloch and J. 8. Mill adhered to the teaching 
of Malthus and Ricardo, but Senior, Chalmers and the 
American economist, Carey, attacked it. 

“Any given quantity of labor,” said Carey, ‘will 
“ now command a much larger quantity of food than 
at any former time, and the tendency is to a constant 
increase... .” 

This bold statement he supported by comparing the 
productiveness of agriculture in 1840 with the miserable 
returns obtained in 1389, as recorded in Eden’s His- 
tory of the Poor: 


“Tt is entirely impossible,” he said, “to read any book 
treating of the people of England of past times, without be- 
ing struck with the extraordinary improvement of the means 
of living—with the increased facility of obtaining food, cloth- 

ing and shelter, and with the improved quality of all—en- 


AG POPULATION | 


abling the common labourer now to indulge in numerous lux- 
uries that in former times were unknown to people who might 
be deemed wealthy.” 


Carey was, of course, quite right as to the facts. 
The fertile lands of the New World in which he lived 
were in the early stages of cultivation, yielding in- 
creasing returns, and the people of England were 
now begining to reap the benefit of that development 
combined with some share in the fruits of their own 
industrial activity. The tendency of that time was 
to a constant increase, and many a wiser man than 
Carey has treated that extraordinary boom in world 
production as the normal return to human efforts which 
would increase at the same rate for ever. 

The changes of the Industrial Revolution caused a 
double reaction against the doctrines of Malthus and 
Ricardo. The growth of industry and wealth, on the 
one hand, gave rise to an optimism which rejected the 
notion that the bulk of mankind must always live upon 
the brink of destitution. The distress which accom- 
panied the great redistribution of labor, on the other 
hand, led to a demand for a more even distribution of 
wealth, which seemed equally to conflict with the 
teaching of the economists. 


“In every experimental science,’”” wrote Macaulay, in 1848, 
“there is a tendency towards perfection. In every human 
being there is a wish to ameliorate his own condition. These 
two principles have often sufficed, even when counteracted 
by great public calamities and by bad institutions, to carry 
civilization rapidly forward. No ordinary misfortune, no 
ordinary misgovernment, will do so much to make a nation 
wretched, as the constant progress of physical knowledge, 
and the constant effort of every man to better himself will 


POPULATION THEORIES 47 


do to make a nation prosperous. . . . It can easily be proved 
that, in our own land, the national wealth has, during at 
least six centuries, been almost uninterruptedly increasing; 
that it was greater under the Tudors than under the Plan- 
tagenets; that it was greater under the Stuarts then under 
the Tudors; that, in spite of battles, sieges and confiscations, 
it was greater on the day of the Restoration than on the day 
when the Long Parliament met; that, in spite of maladmin- 
istration, of extravagance, of public bankruptcy, of two 
costly and unsuccessful wars, of the pestilence and of the fire, 
it was greater on the day of the death of Charles the Second 
than on the day of his Restoration. This progress, having 
continued during many ages, became at length, about the 
middle of the eighteenth century, portentously rapid, and 
has proceeded, during the nineteenth, with accelerated veloc- 
ity. In consequence partly of our geographical and partly 
of our moral position, we have, during several generations, 
been exempt from evils which have elsewhere impeded the 
efforts and destroyed the fruits of industry. . . . The con- 
‘sequence is that a change to which the history of the old. 
world furnishes no parallel has taken place in our country,”’? 


Nine years later, Macaulay added: 


“During the interval which has elapsed since this chapter 
was written, England has continued to advance rapidly in 
material prosperity. . . . There is scarcely a district which 
is not more populous, or a source of wealth which is not more 

productive, at present than in 1848.” 2 


This was the intellectual atmosphere in England in 
the middle of the nineteenth century. The formal 
accuracy of the statement about diminishing returns 
was not generally denied, but there seemed to be little 
significance in a tendency which was continuously 


1 History of England, Chap. III. 2 Ibid. (note). 


48 POPULATION 


counteracted by more powerful opposing tendencies. 
The history of civilization seemed to show that man- 
kind always had, from the days when human co-op- 
eration first began, risen superior to the tendencies to 
which Malthus and Ricardo called attention. Prim- 
itive savages were limited in numbers by the means 
of subsistence which they found within their reach; 
but as soon as men learned to combine together and 
to fashion implements, they began to harness wild 
nature and to make her yield more and more food and 
warmth and shelter for their satisfaction. Therein 
lay the difference between human beings and brute 
beasts; the former could learn to exercise a constantly 
increasing control over their environment, and the 
latter could not. It was not true to say that popula- 
tion invariably increased up to the limits of the avail- 
able subsistence. On the contrary, every increase in 
the numbers of the people brought with it a more than 
proportionate increase in human wealth, so that the 
standard of life had been steadily improving and every 
additional worker put more into the common stock than 
he drew out of it. Hence the most densely populated 
districts offered the greatest and most varied supply of 
the amenities of life. 

Thus, ‘‘the tendency of every experimental science 
towards perfection,’”’ and “the wish of every human 
being to ameliorate his own condition’? were seen by 
Macaulay and his contemporaries to carry civilization 
rapidly forward in spite of the tendency to diminishing 
returns and all other obstacles. 


§ 4. J. S. Mill’s view of Population Problems. John 
Stuart Mill, however, adhered firmly to the general 


POPULATION THEORIES 49 


teaching of Malthus and Ricardo, which he restated 
in a more complete and scientific form. Professor 
Cannan says he did this because ‘‘he was never able 
to shake off completely the effects of the gloomy theo- 
ries .. . with which his father had indoctrinated him,” 
and that ‘‘if he had done so he would have had to find 
a new way of accounting for the historical fall of profits 
and also to change most of his views with regard to 
the whole question of economic progress.” ! Another 
possible explanation of Miull’s attitude is, however, 
that he had too well-disciplined a mind to be deflected 
from a permanent truth by the special circumstances of 
the century in which he lived, however astonishing and 
overwhelming those circumstances might be. 


“Tt is but rarely,” said Mill, ‘that improvements in the 
condition of the labouring classes do anything more than 
give a temporary margin, speedily filled up by an increase in 
their numbers. The use they commonly choose to make of 
any advantageous change in their circumstances, is to take 
it out in the form which, by augmenting the population, 
deprives the succeeding generation of the benefit. Unless, 
either by their general improvement in intellectual and moral 
culture, or at least by raising their habitual standard of 
comfortable living, they can be taught to make a better use 
of favourable circumstances, nothing permanent can be done 
for them; the most promising schemes end only in having a 
“more numerous, but not a happier people.” 2 


By their habitual standard, Mill meant the stand- 
ard below which the people would not multiply, and 
he noticed with satisfaction that every advance in ed- 


1 Theories of Production and Distribution, Chap. V, § 5. 
2 Principles, Book I, Chap. X, § 3. 


50 POPULATION 


ucation, civilization and social improvement tends to 
raise this standard. 


“Subsistence and employment in England,” he said, 
“have never increased more rapidly than in the last forty 
years, but every census since 1821 showed a smaller propor-— 
tional increase of population than that of the period preced- 
ing; and the produce of French agriculture and industry is 
increasing in a progressive ratio, while the population ex- 
hibits, in every quinquennial census, a smaller proportion of 
births to the population.”’ 1 


Mill was fully alive to the fact that “there is another 
agency, in habitual antagonism to the law of dimin- 
ishing return from land... . It is no other,” he said, 
“than the progress of civilization. I use this general 
and somewhat vague expression, because the things to 
be included are so various, that hardly any term of a 
more restricted signification would comprehend them 
rN Bi 

In “the progress of civilization’’ Mill included, first, 
the progress of agricultural knowledge, skill and inven- 
tion. A development such as the introduction of ro- 
tation of crops, or the irrigation of a barren plain, 
may make a great permanent change in the yielding 


capacity of land, altering the point at which maximum. | 


returns are obtained. Secondly, he included improved | 
means of communication. Thirdly, mechanical im- 
provements which have apparently no connection 
with agriculture; such as a better method of melting 
iron, which would cheapen agricultural implements 
and transport; or the use of power in grinding corn, 


1 Principles, Book I, Chap. X, § 3. 
2 Ibid., Chap. XII, § 8. 


POPULATION THEORIES 51 


which would tend to cheapen bread. Fourthly, inven- 
~ tions which facilitate the production of manufactures 
and so compensate the poorest class for the increased 
cost of food by supplying them with, for instance, 
cheaper clothing. Fifthly, improvements in govern- 
ment, and almost every kind of moral and social ad- 
vancement, which react upon the ene of agricul- 
tural labor. 

When all these factors are outstripped by the growth 
of numbers, there are still two expedients, noted by 
Mill, by which a country may hope to lessen the pres- 
sure of its population upon its food supply. One of 
these expedients is the importation of food from abroad. 
The other is emigration. 


§ 5. A criticism of Mill’s View. Throughout the nine- 
teenth century the tide of civilization, flowing through 
all the channels indicated by Mill, continued to rise, 
easily overcoming the tendency to diminishing returns. 
Hence it became fashionable to speak of this ‘‘ pseudo- 
- scientific law,’’ and even so acute a critic as Professor 
Cannan asked, in 1903, why: 


“Mill should be at the trouble of developing a law which 
1. does not come into operation at a very early date in 
the history of society; 
2. is liable to temporary supersessions; and 
3. has been made head against by an antagonizing prin- 
ciple, namely, the progress of civilization, throughout 
the known history of England.” 


As against this view it may be urged that if we were 
to ignore all those scientific laws which are counteracted 
by other laws, we should not get very far in our inter- 


52 | POPULATION 


pretation of phenomena; that, in fact, the tendency 
to diminishing returns had already played an impor- 
tant part in economic history; and, finally, that at the 
very time when Professor Cannan was writing, the 
tendency was, as we have seen, “‘making head” against 
‘the progress of civilization,” and was perhaps prepar- 
ing the way for great and painful changes in the wel- 
fare of the inhabitants of the Old World. 

Thirteen years later, Professor Cannan was quoting, 
with approval, the following passage: 


“The conditions which made possible the unprecedented 
expansion of the European peoples in the last fifty years 
are passing away. The agricultural development which came 
as a result of rapid transportation, the invention of labour- 
saving farm machinery, and the abundance of new and fer- 
tile lands cannot be duplicated. The system of transporta- 
tion can be greatly improved, but no revolution such as came 
with the development of the steam engine seems likely to 
take place again. The efficiency of agricultural implements 
will probably be greatly increased, but they have already 
reached the limit of practicability for extensive farming, not 
because the implements might not be improved upon, but 
because the days of extensive farming are rapidly passing as 
the new countries become more thickly settled. Fertile land 
is no longer to be had for the asking in the United States, and 
will soon be taken up in the other places where Europeans 
can thrive.’’ 1 


“T should like to suggest,’”? comments Mill’s critic, 
“that the next bishop who proposes to recommend 
unreasoning multiplication as a universal rule of human 
conduct should take this passage from Dr. Thompson’s 


1 Population: A study in Malthusianism, by Warren S. Thomp- 
son, Pu. D. (New York). 


POPULATION THEORIES 53 


book as his text. The predictions which it contains 
may be premature, but they cannot be erroneous in any 
other sense. This little planet is getting filled up; if 
we go on increasing our numbers indefinitely, we must 
eventually make it too full, in spite of that steady 
progress in material equipment and knowledge which 
tend to set the limits of desirable density farther 
Oni 

The limits of desirable density are indeed difficult 
to determine. Even if we could say for certain that the 
average worker in a country is better off to-day than 
he has ever been before, we must still admit that he 
might be even richer if the population were smaller. 
On the other hand, while it is safe to say that the de- 
velopments in agriculture and industry have a causal 
connection with the growth of population, no one can 
gauge to what extent the one would have taken place 
without the other. These are matters upon which there 
is room for the widest difference of opinion. Moreover, 
even if we could say precisely what number of people 
would at any given moment obtain the maximum 
wealth per head, we should still be very far from deter- 
mining the limits of desirable density. For who will 
measure the value of human life? How much material 
wealth shall we be willing to forego in order to have chil- 
dren of our own? What proportion of national wealth 
per head will the statesman sacrifice in order to obtain 
more soldiers and colonists for the enhancement of 
national prestige? 

Malthus assumed that it was undesirable for popu- 
lation to press upon the means of subsistance up to the 
point at which the checks of vice and misery begin to 

1 economic Journal, Vol. XXVI, No. 102, June, 1916. 


54. POPULATION 


operate. So far, perhaps, there may be general agree- 
ment. But, as Mill pointed out, the standard of liv- 
ing below which the people will not multiply varies 
from time to time and in different countries and among 
the classes and occupations within each country. The 
tragedy of vice and misery is most apparent when any 
class is forced to lower its standard of living. That is 
the catastrophe which has befallen large sections of 
the population of Europe during the years immediately 
succeeding the war. Is it a temporary product of the 
great upheaval, from which a recovery may be expected 
when the statesmen have at last put their houses in or- 
der? Or has the war merely accelerated an inevitable 
decline in European prosperity; the result of the chang- 
ing ratios of raw products and manufactured goods? 
Are we witnessing a world-wide manifestation of the 
tendency to diminishing returns? It will be the prin- 
cipal object of the following chapters to indicate some 
of-the factors which must be taken into account in 
answering that question. 


§ 6. The Return to Malthus. Whatever the causes may 
have been, the Wheel of Things to which, in the lama’s 
philosophy, the human race is bound, has turned full 
circle. Again, as in the days of Malthus, Europe has 
been exhausted by a great war; famine and disease 
ravage large tracts of Russia and the Balkans; inter- 
national trade is dislocated, and Britain is struggling 
once more with the dual problem of unemployment 
and doles. 

Opinion has swung round with the tide of events. 
Far more striking than the contrast between Adam 
Smith and Malthus is that between the passage from 


POPULATION THEORIES 50 


Macaulay quoted above! and the following extracts 
from a book published in the year 1919: 


“Before the eighteenth century mankind entertained no 
false hopes. To lay the illusions which grew popular at that 
age’s latter end Malthus disclosed a Devil. For half a cen- 
tury all serious economical writings held that Devil in clear 
prospect. For the next half century he was chained up and 
out of sight. Now perhaps we have loosed him again. . . 

“The prosperity of Europe was based on the facts that, 
owing to the large exportable surplus of foodstuffs in Amer- 
ica, She was able to purchase food at a cheap rate measured 
in terms of the labour required to produce her own exports, 
and that, as a result of her previous investments of capital, 
she was entitled to a substantial amount annually without 
any payment in return at all. The second of these factors 
then seemed out of danger, but, as a result of the growth of 
population overseas, chiefly in the United States, the first 
was not secure. ... 

“In short, Europe’s claim on the resources of the New 
World was becoming precarious; the Law of Diminishing 
Returns was at last reasserting itself, and was making it nec- 
essary year by year for Europe to offer a greater quantity 
of other commodities to obtain the same amount of bread; 
and Europe, therefore, could by no means afford the disor- 
ganization of any of her principal sources of supply. . . .? 

“The essential facts of the situation, as I see them, are 
expressed simply. Europe consists of the densest aggregation 
of population in the history of the world. This population 
is accustomed to a relatively high standard of life, in which, 
even now, some sections of it anticipate improvement rather 
than deterioration. In relation to other continents Europe 
is not self-sufficient; in particular it cannot feed itself. ... 


1See pages 47 and 48. 
2 The Economic Consequences of the Peace, by J. M. Keynes, 
Chap. II. 


56 POPULATION 


The danger confronting us, therefore, is the rapid depression 
of the standard of life of the European populations to a point 
which will mean actual starvation for some (a point already 
reached in Russia and approximately reached in Austria). 
Men will not always die quietly. ... 

“Some of the catastrophes of past history, which have — 
thrown back human progress for centuries, have been due 
to the reactions following on the sudden termination, whether 
in the course of Nature or by the act of man, of temporarily 


favourable conditions which have permitted the growth of - 


population beyond what could be provided for when the fa- 
vourable conditions were at an end.” 1 ; 


The view-pomt from which the foregoing passages 
were written is not adopted only by economists. In a 
somewhat different vein, but equally significant of the 
trend of opinion, is the follewing sketch of British 
economic history, also written in 1919: 


“Tt was not till the accession of George III that the in- 
crease in our numbers became rapid. . . . The Industrial 
Revolution came upon us suddenly; it changed the whole 
face of the country and the apparent character of the people. 
In the far future our descendants may look back upon the 
period in which we are living as a strange episode which dis- 
turbed the natural habits of our race. . . . The basis of our 
industrial supremacy was, and is, our coal. ... We were 
no longer able to grow our own food; but we made masses of 
goods which the manufacturers were eager to exchange for 
it; and the population grew like crops on a newly irrigated — 
desert. During the nineteenth century the numbers were 
nearly quadrupled. Let those who think that the popula- 
tion of a country can be increased at will reflect whether it is 
likely that any physical, moral or psychological change came 
over the nation coincidently with the inventions of the spin- 


1 The Economic Consequences of the Peace, Chap. VI. 


POPULATION THEORIES 57 


ning jenny and the steam engine. It is too obvious for dis- 
pute that it was the possession of capital wanting employ- 
ment, and of natural advantages for using it, that called 
these multitudes of human beings into existence, to eat the 
food which they paid for by their labour. And it should be 
equally obvious that the existence of forty-six millions of 
people upon 121,000 square miles of territory depends en- 
tirely upon our finding a market for our manufactures abroad, 
for so only are we able to pay for the food of the people. It 
is most unfortunate that these exports must, with our pres- 
ent population, include coal, which, if we had any thought 
for posterity, we should guard jealously and use sparingly; 
for in five hundred years at the outside our stock will be 
gone, and we shall sink to a third-rate Power at once. We 
are sacrificing the future in order to provide for an excessive 
and discontented population in the present.” 4 


It may be that the writers of these passages are not 
so representative of the general opinion of their time 
as Macaulay was of nineteenth-century culture. Per- 
haps there is to-day no general opinion upon broad 
social issues which we can compare with the coherent 
formularies of the Early Victorians. Here, at any rate, 
we have definite opinions, clearly expressed by writers 
who are widely read and discussed in Europe and 
America. By them we are brought face to face with 
the most fundamental of all economic problems; the 
- relation of the number of human beings to the supply 
of the necessaries of life. They tell us, in effect, that 
we are living, and that our parents have been living, for 
fifty years, in a fool’s paradise; believing that they were 
building up our economic life upon solid foundations, 
and preparing the way for a happier posterity, whereas, 


1W. R. Inge, Outspoken Essays, pp. 91 and 92. 


58 POPULATION 


in reality, they were squandering our family estates and 
wasting the gains of civilization on a mere increase in 
numbers. ; 
This is a very different story from Macaulay’s vision 
of a world in which the tendency to perfection over- 
comes all obstacles. It demands instant and thorough © 
investigation. Thus far we have been mainly concerned 
with the history of a controversy. This was necessary 
if only to account for the neglect of population prob- 
lems by the pre-war world. However pardonable that 
neglect may have been hitherto, it is clear that it must 
not and cannot continue. We must face the facts. 


CHAPTER IV | 
FOOD AND RAW MATERIALS 


‘‘ All the labour of man is for his mouth, and yet the appe- 
tite is not filled.” . 
Ecclesiastes vi, 7. 


§ 1. Analogy between a Shrinking Earth and a Grow- 
ing Population. If the world were gradually growing 
smaller and population remaining constant, the effect 
upon human beings would be very like that produced 
by the growth of population in a world which remains 
the same size. It has been estimated that if the popula- 
tion of the world continued to increase at the rate at 
which it was growing between 1906 and 1911, it would 
double in sixty years. Let us imagine, therefore, that 
the world is shrinking at such a rate that it will be half 
its present size in sixty years. The suggestion seems 
rather an alarming one as it stands, but to make the 
analogy more accurate we must assume that the shrink- 
age is all taking place in the food-producing areas. We 
should rightly regard such a state of things as more 
serious than that which actually faces us. For, in the 
- first place, the growth of population carries with it 
an opportunity for increased efficiency in production, 
which must be set off against the increased demand 
_ for food. Other things being equal, a thousand million 
people on half the earth would not, therefore, be so 
well off as two thousand millions on the whole earth. 
In the second place, we know from experience that, 
59 


60 POPULATION 


unless some new discovery enables us to produce food 
more easily, the population will not, in fact, continue 
to increase at its present rate. 

Though the analogy is not complete, however, it 
may serve to bring out a few points which would other- 
wise remain somewhat obscure. It illustrates the Law 
of Diminishing Returns. If the returns to agriculture 
remained constant, we should have no economic reason 
for alarm at the shrinking of the earth. The same 
quantity of capital and labor would be available and 
would yield the same amount of food when it was ap- 
plied to a smaller quantity of land. Even a single field 
would then suffice to maintain the whole population 
at their present standard of living! Such a supposition 
is obviously absurd; but it is no more absurd than it © 
would be to deny the tendency to diminishing returns. 
Recognizing then, as we should, that the shrinking 
earth would yield a smaller return of food to each suc- 
cessive dose of capital and labor applied to it, we should 
be forced to tackle the problem of maintaining the pop- 
ulation on the food produced from a smaller acreage. 
The price of food would rise. Increasing quantities 
of capital and labor would be transferred from the pro- 
duction of other articles, such as clothes and houses, 
to the production of food. Some land, which is now 
more profitably used for other purposes, would also be 
ploughed up and put under cultivation. Thus, by 
a considerable transference of resources from the pro- 
duction of less essential commodities, the primary need 
of human beings for food would be supplied and the 
whole population might continue to exist on a lower 
standard of comfort and well-being. 

In all probability no actual famine would result from 


FOOD AND RAW MATERIALS 61 


such a decrease in the size of the earth as we have sup- 
posed; no one need die of starvation; it is possible that 
no one need eat less food than before; but food would 
be dearer and many other things would also be dearer 
and scarcer, because capital and labor would be diverted 
from making them in order to keep up the food supply. 
A unit of labor applied in industry would consequently 
yield a purchasing power over a smaller quantity of 
commodities of all kinds. 


§ 2. The Transference of Resources in War-time. It is 
in this way that the pressure of population on the food 
supply makes itself felt. Those who were in England 
during the war will remember how tennis lawns were 
turned into potato patches and public parks divided 
- up into allotments. It is impossible to say what loss 
of satisfaction was Involved in this change. We only 
know that before and after the special food-shortage 
- caused by the war, people preferred to take this part 
of their income in the form of games and flowers, but 
that when the pressure on subsistence reached a cer- 
tain pitch they sacrificed these enjoyments in order to 
obtain fresh vegetables. A similar transference of re- 
sources was taking place on a much greater scale in 
the food-producing parts of the world. India, the first 
country to have a sowing time after the outbreak of 
war, immediately increased her wheat-growing area by 
4,000,000 acres. In North America, 12,000,000 acres 
more wheat were sown in the spring of 1915. Australia 
added 3,000,000 acres, about 30 per cent, to her wheat 
area. Altogether, therefore, the area of the world’s 
surface devoted to the growing of wheat was increased 
during the first year of war by about 19,000,000 acres. 


62 POPULATION 


These figures indicate considerable elasticity in the 
world’s food supply. American and Canadian farmers 
had to decide whether to increase their acreage before 
they knew how far prices would rise or even whether 
they would be able to get their wheat to the European 
markets. They were therefore willng to make a con- 
siderable extension for a speculative return. In fact, 
they rather over-estimated the demand, or the excep- 
tional harvests of 1915-16 upset their calculations; 
prices did not reach the expected level and the acreage 
under wheat decreased a little during the later years of 
the war. The farmers had shown, however, what they 
could do in a single year if more food were required. 
Moreover, there is still land in Canada uncultivated, 
and the possibilities of intensive cultivation there are 
enormous. The average yield of wheat in Canada is 
under 19 bushels an acre, while in the United Kingdom 
it is 32 bushels. In the Argentine, also, there has been 
during the last thirty years a tremendous extension of 
the area under wheat, and the application of intensive 
methods there may be expected to produce huge sup- 
plies. The United States bad 71,500,000 acres under 
wheat in 1919, or 11,000,000 more than in any previous 
year; and 6,600,000 acres under rye, or three times the 
area under the crop in 1912.1 This great extension of 
cultivation took place under the stimulus of Mr. 
Hoover’s guaranteed price and, though very unlikely 
to be maintained, it shows what can be done. 

“Why all this fuss, then, about the Law of Dimin- 
ishing Returns and the pressure of population on the 
means of subsistence?”’ the reader, reassured by the 
foregoing paragraph may ask. Why, dear sir, do you 

1Sir R. Henry Rew, Food Supplies in Peace and War. 


FOOD AND RAW MATERIALS — 63 


walk, or take a bus in the City of London, when 
there are taxis about and a Rolls-Royce to be bought 
_round the corner? The question is whether the world, 
and more particularly Europe, can afford to go on in- 
creasing its population and paying the price required 
to extract these potential food supplies from the soil. 
~ Why have so many city clerks given up their allot- 
ments since the war ended? Their reasons are in- 
structive. One will tell you that he found “it didn’t 
pay.”’ He was tired when he returned from the office 
in the evening and did not feel inclined to go in for 
hard manual labor; and if he rose early in the morn- 
ing to dig, he found himself sleepy and inefficient later 
in the day. Another would have liked to keep on his 
allotment, but the land was unfortunately required 
for other purposes. A third has changed his main 
occupation and no longer has time for cultivating the 
sou. A fourth is “fed up” with the disappointments 
due to drought, or insect pests, or some of the other 
obstacles which impede the cultivator, especially if 
he is not equipped with the most scientific knowledge 
and implements. 

All these reasons illustrate the tendency for resources 
to be diverted into those occupations in which they can 
contribute the maximum net product. If food again 
became as scarce in Britain as it was during the war, 
these clerks would resume their agricultural efforts. If 
it became still scarcer, they might even be induced to 
give up their city jobs and devote themselves to food 
- production. It is the same in the world as a whole. 
The growth of population increases the demand for 
food. The Law of Diminishing Returns shows itself 
in an increasing difficulty in extracting further food 


64 POPULATION 


supplies from the soil. More and more capital and 
labor are required for each proportionate increase in 
the supply, and consequently, more and more human 
effort must be put into the making of other things that 
we ask the farmer to take in exchange for his produce. 
Otherwise, he will not think it worth while to culti- 
vate his land more intensively. He will be content 
to grow the same quantity each year, unless he sees a 
prospect of making a profit out of the application of 
more capital and labor to his land. Thus, as the city 
clerk gave up his leisure or his tennis for potatoes, so 
every one may have to sacrifice various things from 
which he derives satisfaction in order to obtain a 
sufficient share of the food produced under these cir- 
cumstances of increasing difficulty. 


§ 3. The Pressure of Population upon Subsistence. It 
has already been indicated that the growth of popula- 
tion is not likely to be the cause of famine. ‘The pres- 
sure upon the food supply produced by numbers alone 
is sufficiently gradual to allow an adjustment to be 
made in the allocation of resources before any danger 
of starvation occurs. People will give up luxuries of 
all kinds, and even necessities like fuel and shelter, 
before they will go without food. It is this gradual 
depression of the standard of life, rather than actual 
famine, that is likely to result from an excessive growth 
of population. For when the standard of life has been 
reduced to any considerable extent, the death-rate 
will rise, children and old people succumbing to pri- 
vation; and, even if the birth-rate remain unchanged, 
numbers will be kept within the bare means of sub- 
sistence. It is obvious, however, that a community 


FOOD AND RAW MATERIALS 65 


which is thus reduced to the lowest necessities of life 
will suffer much more severely from a sudden dearth 
than one which has a margin of resources to draw 
upon. In this way over-population may be the main, 
though not the immediate, cause of famine. The popu- 
lation of European Russia increased from less than 
100,000,000 in 1890 to about 150,000,000 at the out- 
break of war; and the excess of births over deaths in 
Russia as a whole was at the rate of 2,000,000 per 
annum in the years immediately preceding 1914. This 
tremendous increase must have contributed greatly 
to the magnitude of the catastrophe before which the 
world now stands in horrified impotence. In India, 
too, the population has been increasing with disquiet- 
ing rapidity owing to-the removal by British rule of 
many of the checks to population which formerly pre- 
vailed; and it is probable that the recurrence of famines 
in that country is partly attributable to this increase. 
In large parts of India people are entirely dependent 
on agriculture, and the harvest is so completely de- 
stroyed by a single monsoon failure that the laborer is 
thrown out of work for a whole year. If he has no 
savings, he and his family must starve, or be kept 
alive by relief work, even though food may be ob- 
tainable from neighboring districts. It is clear, there- 
fore, that an increase in population which absorbs the 
whole surplus of a normal harvest may transform the 
effect of a monsoon failure from unemployment into 
famine. Certainly the Indian Government has taken 
energetic steps to grapple with the famine problem, 
both in the way of prevention, by transport and 1rri- 
gation schemes, and by the organization of relief when 
famines occur. No criticism of British rule is therefore 


66 POPULATION. 


implied here. It is only suggested that the growth of 
population may account for the fact that famines still 
occur in India, in spite of the measures which have 
been taken to avert them. 

The preceding argument might be thought to im- 
ply that an increase in the number of the inhabitants 
of a country must always lower the standard of life 
which has hitherto prevailed there. That is not 
so. The factors that Mull grouped together under 
the comprehensive title of “the progress of civilization” 
make a certain increase in numbers frequently desirable. 
Some of these factors, indeed, depend upon an increase 
in numbers to enable them to come into action. If, 
therefore, we do not dwell so much, upon the need for 
a certain increase as upon the disadvantages of an 
excessive increase, it is only because that ‘‘power of 
population,” to which Malthus called attention, is 
so great that the former is always forthcoming when 
it is required. A multitude of the unborn are always 
crowding round the door of life. Open it a little way 
and they squeeze through in such numbers that you 
will have much ado to close it again! 


§4. The Economic Advantages of a Growing Popula- 
tion. In comparing the growth of population with a 
shrinkage of the earth, it was remarked that the for- 
mer would be less alarming than the latter, because 
an increase in population carries with it an opportunity 
for increased efficiency in production. It will be worth 
while to examine that statement more closely. 

The raw materials of manufactures are all either agri- 
cultural or mineral products and the Law of Dimin- 
ishing Returns applies, as we saw in Chapter II, to 


FOOD AND RAW MATERIALS 67 


these as well as to food. The cost of raw materials, 
however, is often a very small part of the total cost of © 
~ production in manufactures, and all the other costs tend 
to decrease as the amount of production increases. 
Manufactures are much more susceptible than agri- 
culture to improvements in mechanical skill. Mass 
production enables very great economies to be made, 
and facilitates that world-wide division of labor which 
has contributed so enormously to the general wealth. 
In manufactures, therefore, the causes which tend to 
diminish costs as the amount produced increases have 
generally preponderated greatly over the tendency of 
the raw materials to increase in costs, and it is prob- 
able that in most industries the balance will remain 
tilted in a favorable direction for a long time to come. 
Moreover, the growth of population has facilitated 
that development of the means of transport both by 
land and sea, which, as we have seen, enables the prod- 
ucts of distant lands to be exchanged at trifling costs. 
The actual proximity of large numbers of human be- 
ings to one another, objectionable as it may be to those 
who love solitude and country scenes, enables great 
economies to be made in the distribution of goods, and 
renders possible some amenities of civilization, such 
as picture-palaces and picture galleries, which could 
- not be provided in a sparsely populated world. This 
gathering together of multitudes also has some effect 
in counteracting the tendency to diminishing returns 
in agriculture, by introducing an economy in the dis- 
tribution of food. It is clear that British agriculture 
could not be profitably carried on so much more inten- 
sively than that of Canada unless proximity to the con- 
sumers exercised a powerful influence on costs. It is 


68 POPULATION 


equally clear that if much smaller quantities of Cana- 

dian wheat were required in this country, the cost of 

bringing them to market would be increased. 
Taking all these factors together it will be seen that 


the growth of population may under certain circum- _ 


stances actually increase the amount of wealth per head, 
even though food may be getting dearer. Diminish- 
ing returns to agriculture and the diversion of an ever- 
increasing proportion of the total supply of capital and 
labor into the production of food and raw materials 
may be outweighed by the increasing returns obtained 
in manufactures. A smaller proportion of the total 
population employed in manufacturing industries may 
thus supply the aggregate wants of the community 
more fully than before. Houses and clothing may be 
so plentiful as to more than compensate for the com- 
parative scarcity of food. 

To put the same point in another way, let us assume 
that owing to improved machinery and business organ- 
ization the Lancashire cotton industry is yielding in- 
creasing returns, in spite of some increase in the price 
of raw cotton. The wages of the cotton operative will 
tend to rise and the price of cotton goods to fall. 
He may therefore be able to buy as much food as be- 
fore at a higher price and still have more money to 
spend on other things; and these other things—boots 
and gramophones and rides on motor-coaches—may 
also be getting cheaper through economies obtained 
in their production on a large scale. His real income 
may thus be considerably increased. 

It would be very interesting if we could distinguish 
between those economies in production which depend 
upon an increase in numbers and those which would 


~ 


FOOD AND RAW MATERIALS 69 


take place if the population remained stationary. Un- 
fortunately they are inextricably mixed up together. 
Many discoveries and inventions which depend upon 
the brain-work of a few men working in seclusion would 
certainly be made in any civilized society, whether 
the population was increasing or not. Some of these 
could be profitably applied under any circumstances. 
Others, however, like the discovery of steam and 
electricity, require a dense population if their po- 
tentialities are to be fully developed in such enter- 
prises as railways and telegraphs. Probably an in- 
creasing population was necessary to call forth the 
capital for the great railway systems which were created 
throughout the world towards the end of last century. 
Manufacturers, again, certainly require a considerable 
density of population in order to obtain those econ- 
omies of mass production and the division of labor 
which lead to such astonishing supplies of cheap and 
sometimes nasty goods. It is true that many people 
would rather have one suit of hand-made cloth than 
twenty suits of the stuff which is turned out by ma- 
chinery, but it is clear, at any rate, that much larger 
quantities of clothing, per head, are available in a 
densely populated world than could be produced by 
a scattered community. Finally, as we have already 
seen, there are economies in distribution which depend 
entirely upon a large population being congregated in 
a relatively small area, and many developments of 
civilization, some wholly good and others of more ques- 
tionable intrinsic value, but all sought after by the 
modern town-dweller, which could not have been in- 
troduced into a less populous world. 

It is not possible, then, to say with any precision 


70 POPULATION 


how far the progress of civilization and the accumula- 
tion of wealth depend upon an increasing population. 
Up to a point, the growth of numbers has certainly 
contributed largely to the growth of wealth. There 
are indications, however, that the most sweeping econ- 
omies which result from increasing numbers have al- 
ready been secured in the industrial areas of Europe 
and the United States. It is probable that the wealth 
of civilized countries was still growing faster than the 
population, that the wealth per head was still increas- 
ing in the years immediately preceding the war. But 
it is probable also that the wealth per head would have 
been increasing faster still, if the population had not 
been growing so rapidly. From the economic point of 
view, at all events, there seems no reason to bemoan 
that slowing down of the rate of growth of the popula- 
tion of the Western world which has alarmed some 
English bishops and French patriots in recent years. 

Taking a somewhat longer view, we may indeed see 
good reason to strengthen this tentative opinion. For 
if it appears to be somewhat undesirable for numbers 
to continue to multiply rapidly when we are consid- 
ering the immediate effect upon the welfare of the 
people, it will appear much less desirable when we look 
to the future. 

The main raw materials of European industry are 
either imported from other continents or raised from 
mines. ‘Those which are imported are chiefly agri- 
cultural products, like cotton and wool, which are 
subject to the Law of Diminishing Returns. 


$5. The Supply of Raw Cotton. Now the production 
of cotton, as we saw in Chapter II, is not keeping pace 


FOOD AND RAW MATERIALS 71 


with the demand for it. Between 1875 and 1895 the 
quantity of cotton produced in the United States in- 
~ creased so much that the price fell 54 per cent. Thus 
in a period of falling prices, cotton fell more than 
almost any other commodity. Between 1895 and 1910, 
however, when the average price of raw materials rose 
25 per cent, the price of cotton rose 71 per cent, while 
wheat rose only 17 per cent. The American cotton 
belt had been invaded by wheat and other crops. The 
Western extension of the belt had been prevented by 
a shortage of negro labor. For the picking of cotton 
is disagreeable work, which must be done by hand, 
and it is practically confined in the United States to 
negro labor. Moreover, the growing demand of Amer- 
ican mills had limited the amount of American cotton 
available for Lancashire, and though there are several 
other parts of the world in which cotton can be grown, 
there are few where labor conditions and climate are 
both favorable. Fully 60 per cent of the world’s to- 
tal supplies of cotton are grown in the United States, 
and about 73 per cent of British imports of raw cotton 
come from that source. 

In the years immediately preceding the war the 
acreage under cotton in America was considerably 
extended, but the yield per acre was reduced by the 
ravages of a very serious insect pest, the boll weevil, 
and the price continued to rise. That this rise in price 
was due to the increased cost of production was shown 
by the fluctuations in supply. A good crop caused a 
sharp fall in prices, and so much of the cotton was pro- 
duced near the margin of profitable production that a 
fall in prices caused a restriction of the acreage in the 
following year; and this restriction of acreage naturally 


72 POPULATION 


led, in a normal year, to a reduced crop, a rise in prices 
and an extended acreage again. In the language of 
economics, the supply showed great elasticity. 

The war caused a great decrease in the demand for 
cotton; and the supply, under the conditions indicated, 
inevitably shrank correspondingly. Meanwhile, the 
boll weevil invaded new territories and annexed great 
areas of the American cotton belt, sadly reducing the 
yield of the crop. The result of the depredations of this 
enemy is that it is doubtful whether the American cotton 
crop will ever again reach its pre-war magnitude, unless 
improved methods of production, including the defeat 
of the boll weevil, are devised, or a great permanent 
rise in prices makes it profitable to increase supplies 
under the present adverse conditions. When it is re- 
membered that the pre-war supply was not keeping 
pace with the world’s demand, it will be obvious that 
the position is an anxious one for the manufacturers of 
cotton goods. There are, no doubt, many countries— 
India, Egypt, the Sudan, Mesopotamia, China—which 
are potentially capable of growing all the cotton which 
the manufacturing countries may need. Unfortunately, 
the essential condition upon which the development. 
of these sources of supply depends is the same as 
that demanded by the American producers; a rise 
in prices, to compensate for the Law of Diminishing 
Returns operating, in this case, through the extension 
of production into less favorable localities. 


§6. The Supply of Wool. Wool, like cotton, fell in 
price very heavily between 1875 and 1895, but owing 
to the great development of Australian production, 
it only rose the average 25 per cent during the years 


FOOD AND RAW MATERIALS 73 


between 1895 and 1910. The war caused a serious 
diminution in the supply, but there is little doubt that, 
when the world at last recovers from the paralyzing 
effects of concussion, the pre-war production of wool will 
be restored. If a great increase of supply is required, 
it is probable that a tendency to diminishing returns 
will necessitate a rise in the price of this commodity 
also. But readers of the first volume in this series 
will remember that wool is a joint product, subject to 
special conditions of supply. When Charles Lamb 
was asked by an agricultural travelling companion 
what he thought of the prospects of turnips, he replied, 
“That must depend on boiled mutton.’ He was think- 
ing of joint demand; but on the supply side, wool de- 
pends, even more intimately than turnips, upon mutton. 
The proportions of the two commodities to one another 
can be considerably varied by cross-breeding, and it is 
therefore probable that a small rise in the price of wool 
will cause a considerable increase in the quantity pro- 
duced. 

The prospects of the wool supply during, say, the 
next fifty years, are not therefore so disquieting as 
those of cotton. Nevertheless, we must remember 
that the production of this commodity requires great 
open spaces. The growth of population and transport 
facilities mevitably lead to the transference of land 
from pasture to arable and dairy farming. We are 
concerned with the ebb and flow of the great tides in 
human progress and must not be deceived by the little 
waves which advance and recede continually on the 
fringe of the ocean. Civilization is always encroach- 
ing on the pasture lands and driving the shepherds into 
remoter areas. The River Plate Republics and the 


74 POPULATION 


United States are reducing their production of wool. 
Only Australia is still to a small extent on the up-grade. 
The question arises as to how long it will be before 
Australia, and even Siberia, grows too populous and 
accessible for sheep-farming, on anything like its pres- 
ent terms, to remain its most profitable industry. 
Nobody wants to hold back these countries. We look 
to them to help to maintain the necessary supply of 
wheat and other food for human consumption. We 
want to see them developing and supporting flourish- 
ing communities of their own. But the European 
textile industries are faced by the uncomfortable fact 
that the food they need for their operatives is compet- 
ing with the raw material upon which they work, for 
room to grow in sufficient quantities to satisfy their 
demand for each of them. ‘The fertile places on the 
earth, which have not already been made to contrib- 
ute something towards the maintenance of human 
life, are hard to find. This planet is fillmg up, and un- 
less mankind makes some sudden leap forward in 
knowledge and power, it will not be long before a 
steady permanent fall in real wages warns us that 
world-population is increasing faster than the world’s 
produce. 

The conditions which govern the supply of the other 
kind of raw materials—those which are raised from 
mines—will be discussed in the next chapter, and it 
will be convenient to reserve further consideration of 
the relations between raw products and population - 
until we are able to lump all the former together. 


§ 7. Fisheries. Before we pass on from vegetables and 
animals to minerals, however, mention should be made 


FOOD AND RAW MATERIALS 75 


- of a food which has played an important part in his- 
tory and may become still more influential in the fu- 
~ ture. This food is ‘‘neither flesh nor fowl,’ but ‘‘good | 
red herring.”’ 

In years gone by the fisheries were regarded by both 
Holland and England as ‘“‘the chiefest trade and gold- 
mine” and “the way to winne wealth.”’ British fish- 
eries were nursed by kings and statesmen, not only 
for the food they produced, but because the fishing 
fleets supplied the finest seamen for the Navy, and 
because “he that hath the trade of fishing becomes 
mightier than all the world besides in number of 
ships.” 

River-fisheries are undoubtedly subject to the Law 
of Diminishing Returns, though the English salmon 
rivers might with a little care be made to yield an in- 
creasing return to considerable doses of capital and 
labor at the present time. As to the sea, opinions differ. 
A herring produces about 30,000 eggs and a plaice may 
lay as many as half a million. A very large proportion 
of these eggs are destroyed, and probably only a small 
minority of little fishes grow to maturity. It is there- 
fore arguable that the capture of grown fishes merely 
releases space and food for others to replace them. On 
the other hand, experience seems to show that the 
stock of plaice in the North Sea has actually been di- 
minished by vigorous fishing operations. Very little 
is at present known about fish and their way of life, 
but the question is an important one for, whether they 
are subject to diminishing returns or not, they consti- 
tute an immense self-replenishing reservoir of human 
food. In the words of an old “Fisher’s Song”’: 


76 POPULATION 


“The husbandman has rent to pay 
(Blow, winds, blow) 
And seed to purchase every day 
(Row, boys, row), 
But he who farms the rolling deeps, 
Though never sowing, always reaps; 
The ocean’s fields are fair and free, 
There are no rent days on the sea.” 


CHAPTER V 
COAL AND IRON 


“Took unto the rock whence ye were hewn, and to the 
hole of the pit whence ye were digged.”’ 
Isaiah li, 1. 


§1. Jevons and the Coal Question. Another distinguished 
Englishman, besides John Stuart Mill, realized the 
temporary character of the great boom in wealth and 
trade which intoxicated the world in the nineteenth cen- 
tury. In 1865 W. Stanley Jevons gave a shock to 
British complacency and even, it is said, startled Mr. 
Gladstone, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, by 
publishing his book on The Coal Question: An Inquiry 
Concerning the Progress of the Nation, and the Probable 
Exhaustion of our Coal-mines. 

The book is a classic. Other people, including Jev- 
ons’s own son, have written more exhaustively on the 
subject, in the light of fuller statistical data. Two 
Royal Commissions, one appointed especially to in- 
vestigate the allegations made by Jevons, have sat 
upon the subject. Subsequent events have confirmed 
some and falsified other of the prophecies contained 
in the book. But it still remains the best and most 
disturbing exposition of the Coal Question and it still 
seizes the reader’s attention as only a work of genius 
can. 

Even a work of genius, however, if it deals with a 

77 


78 POPULATION 


practical question, must be ruthlessly handled, and 
Jevons’s argument can be summarized as follows: * 

If Britain at present possesses a certain leading and 
worldwide influence, it is not due to any general in- 
tellectual superiority, but to “the union of certain 
happy mental qualities with material resources of an 
altogether peculiar character.”’ 

We must apply the Malthusian principle of popula- 
tion to the consumption of coal. ‘Our subsistence no 
longer depends upon our produce of corn. The mo- 
mentous repeal of the Corn Laws throws us from corn 
upon coal. It marks, at any rate, the epoch when coal 
was finally recognized as the staple produce of the coun- 
try; it marks the ascendency of the manufacturing 
interest, which is only another name for the develop- 
ment of the use of coal.” 

By virtue of our possession of coal we have made the 
several quarters of the globe our willing tributaries. 
“The plains of North America and Russia are our 
cornfields; Chicago and Odessa our granaries; Canada 
and the Baltic are our timber-forests; Australasia con- 
tains our sheep-farms, and in Argentina and on the 
western prairies of North America are our herds of oxen; 
Peru sends her silver, and the gold of South Africa and 
Australia flows to London; the Hindus and the Chin- 
ese grow tea for us, and our coffee, sugar and spice plan- 
tations are in all the Indies. Spain and France are 
our vineyards, and the Mediterranean our fruit-gar- 
den; and our cotton grounds, which for long have oc- 
cupied the Southern United States, are now being ex- 
tended everywhere in the warm regions of the earth.” 


1The passages between inverted commas are quoted verbatim 
from Jevons. 


COAL AND IRON 79 


This is what coal has done for us, and “those per- 
sons very much mistake the power of coal and steam, 
and iron, who think that it is now fully felt and ex- 
hibited; it will be almost indefinitely greater in future 
years than it now is. Science points to this conclu- 
sion, and common observation confirms it.”? But “we © 
should be hasty in assuming that the growth of gen- 
eral commerce ensures for this island everlasting riches 
and industrial supremacy.” We have to remember 
that, “while other countries mostly subsist upon the 
annual and ceaseless income of the harvest, we are 
drawing more and more upon a capital which yields 
no annual interest, but. once turned into light and heat 
and motive power, is gone for ever into space. 

“Rather more than a century of our present prog- 
ress would exhaust our mines to the depth of 4000 feet, 
or 1500 feet deeper than our present deepest mine.” 

If all our coal were brought from an average depth of 
some 2000 feet, our manufacturers would have to con- 
tend with a doubled price of fuel. If the average depth 
were increased to 4000 feet, a further great but un- 
known rise in the cost of fuel must be the consequence. 

“But I am far from asserting, from these figures, 
that our coal-fields will be wrought to a depth of 4000 
feet in little more than a century. 

“T draw the conclusion that I think anyone would 
draw, that we cannot long maintain our present rate » 
of increase of consumption; that we can never advance 
to the higher amounts of consumption supposed. But 
this only means that the check to our progress must 
become perceptible within a century from the present 
time; that the cost of fuel must rise, perhaps within a 
lifetime, to a rate injurious to our commercial and man- 


80 POPULATION 


ufacturing supremacy; and the conclusion is inevitable, 
that our present happy progressive condition is a thing 
of limited duration.” 

The public seems unaware that ‘‘a sudden check to 
the expansion of our supply would be the very mani- 
festation of exhaustion we dread. It would at once 
bring on us the rising price, the transference of industry, 
and the general reverse of prosperity, which we may 
hope not to witness in our days.” 

Economy in the use of fuel offers no way out of our 
difficulty. Economy in the domestic consumption of 
coal would be a good thing but would only affect a 
small portion of the total consumption. ‘But the 
economy of coal in manufactures is a different matter. 
It is wholly a confusion of ideas to suppose that the 
economical use of fuel is equivalent to a diminished 
consumption. ‘The very contrary is the truth.” The 
whole history of the steam engine is one of economy, 
and ‘‘the reduction of the consumption of coal, per ton 
of iron, to less than one-third of its former amount, 
was followed, in Scotland, by a tenfold total consump- 
tion, between the years 1830 and 1863, not to speak of 
the indirect effect of cheap iron in accelerating other 
coal-consuming branches of industry.” ‘ 

“The addition to our population in four years now 
(1865) is as great as the whole increase of the cen- 
tury 1651-1751, and the increase of coal consumption 
between 1859 and 1862 is equal to the probable 
annual consumption at the beginning of this cen- 
tury. It is on this account that I attach less im- 
portance than might be thought right to an exact es- 
timate of the coal existing in Great Britain. ... The 
absolute amount of coal in the country rather affects 


COAL AND IRON 81 


the height to which we shall rise than the time for which 
we shall enjoy the happy prosperity of progress. 

“It has been suggested by many random thinkers 
that when our coal is done here, we may import it as 
we import so many other raw materials from abroad. 
...1 am sorry to say that the least acquaintance 
with the principles of trade, and the particular circum- 
stances of our trade, furnishes a complete negative to 
all such notions. While the export of coal is a great 
and growing branch of our trade, a reversal of the trade, 
and a future return current of coal, is a commercial 
impossibility and absurdity. . . . No one will properly 
understand the trade in coal who forgets that coal is 
the most bulky and weighty of all commodities. .. . The 
cost of carriage is the main element of price every- 
where except in the coal-field, or its close neighbour- 
hood.’’ If our supplies were imported from America, 
about 1200 vessels would be required to maintain our 
present supplies only. “Our industry would then have 
to contend with fuel, its all-important food, three or 
four times as dear, as it now is in England and America. 

“But it is asked, How is a large export trade of coal 
possible, if an import trade is commercially impossible? 
... It is mainly due to the fact that coal is carried as 
ballast, or makeweight, and is subject to the low rates 
of back-carriage. ... Our imports consist of bulky 
raw materials and food. ... A large part of our ship- 
ping would thus have to leave our ports half empty, 
or in ballast, unless there were some makeweight or 
natural supply of bulky cargo as back-carriage.... 
To import coal as well as other raw materials would 
be against the essentially reciprocal nature of trade. 
The weight of our inward cargoes would be multiplied 


82 POPULATION 


many times, and but little weight left for outward 
carriage; almost every influence which now acts, and 
for centuries has acted, in favour of our maritime and 
manufacturing success would then act against it, and 
it would be arrogance and folly indeed to suppose that 
even Britain can carry forward her industry in spite 
of nature, and in the want of every material condi- 
tion. In our successes hitherto it is to nature we owe 
at least as much as to our own energies.”’ 

It is impossible to do justice to Jevons’s closely knit 
argument in a brief summary, but the foregoing sen- 
tences from his book may serve the double purpose of 
conveying some notion of the drift of his thought and 
at the same time introducing the subject to the reader 
of this handbook. If anyone is thereby encouraged to 
read Jevons for himself, he will be amply rewarded. 


§ 2. The Meaning of ‘Exhaustion.’”’ Although he was 
a singularly clear writer, Jevons was misunderstood. 
There seems to be a deeply rooted human instinct to 
resist a disagreeable truth and to misrepresent its ex- 
ponents if they cannot be ignored. Just as Malthus 
was accused of having said that population would in- 
crease beyond the means of subsistence, when, in fact, 
he said that it couldn’t; so Jevons was supposed by 
many people, including both the Royal Commissions 
appointed to investigate the question, to have said that 
the coal consumption of the United Kingdom would 
reach certain very large amounts, whereas his whole 
point was that the rate of growth in coal consumption 
would inevitably be checked. 

One of the most vital points to grasp in the study of 
the rise and fall of human welfare is that put forward 


COAL AND IRON 83 


by Malthus when he said: ‘‘A man who is locked up 
in a room may fairly be said to be confined by the walls 
of it, though he may never touch them.’ This was 
what Jevons was driving at in connection with the 
coal supply. ‘Many people,’ he wrote, “perhaps 
entertain a vague notion that some day our coal seams 
will be found emptied to the bottom, and swept clean 
like a coal-cellar. Our fires and furnaces, they think, 
will then be suddenly extinguished, and cold and dark- 
ness will be left to reign over a depopulated country. 
It is almost needless to say, however, that our mines 
are literally mexhaustible. We cannot get to the 
bottom of them; and though we may some day 
have to pay dear for fuel, it will never be positively 
wanting.” 

When he discussed the inevitable ‘‘exhaustion of 
our coal-mines,” therefore, Jevons meant their deple- 
tion to a point at which we could no longer maintain 
our extraordinary rate of progress. The average an- 
nual rate of growth of our coal consumption, at the 
time when Jevons wrote, was 34 per cent. If our 
consumption of coal had continued to multiply at 
that rate for 110 years, the total amount consumed in 
that period would have been one hundred thousand 
million tons. Now the most reliable estimate that 
Jevons could obtain of the available coal in Britain 
showed eighty-three thousand million tons within a 
depth of 4000 feet. He naturally concluded, therefore, 
as we have seen, that we could not long maintain that 
rate of progress. 

Within twenty years the rate of growth began to 
diminish. The average rate of increase during the last 
forty years has been about 2 per cent perannum. Jev- 


84 POPULATION 


ons’s anticipation has thus been justified. On the 
other hand, the estimate, which he adopted, of the 
available coal in Great Britian has been rejected as 
too low by later authorities. The Royal Commission 
which issued its final report in 1905, taking, as Jevons 
had done, the limit of practicable depth as 4000 feet, 
estimated the available quantity of coal in the proved 
coal-fields of the United Kingdom as just over one 
hundred thousand million tons. Although about six 
thousand million tons had been raised in the interval, 
this estimate was nearly elghteen thousand million 
tons higher than that used by Jevons. The coal-fields — 
of Ireland, which are included in the later estimate 
and not in the earlier one, are thought to contain less 
than two hundred million tons, but the excess is ac- 
counted for partly by the difference in the areas re- 
garded as productive and partly by new discoveries 
and more accurate knowledge. 

If after another forty years of diligent coal-getting 
we could hope for a similar increase in the quantity 
remaining in the earth, we should conclude that we 
were the happy owners of a widow’s cruse and could 
regard Jevons as a discredited prophet. As, however, 
that is a supposition which, as Malthus would have 
said, ‘‘cannot be inferred upon any just philosophical 
erounds,’?’ we must remember that Jevons himself 
did not attribute much importance to the accuracy 
of the estimate in question. ‘‘Were our coal half as 
abundant again,’’ he wrote, ‘fas Mr. Hull (the au- | 
_ thor of the estimate) states, the effect would only be 
to defer the climax of our growth perhaps for one gen- 
eration. And I repeat, the absolute amount of coal in 
the country rather affects the height to which we shall rise 


COAL AND IRON 85 


than the time for which we shall enjoy the happy pros- 
perity of progress.” 


§ 3. The Influence of Protection. It is probable that 
the competition of other countries, especially Ger- 
many, has caused British coal production to take a 
somewhat different course from that anticipated by 
Jevons. He seems to have expected that the rate of 
growth would be continued and perhaps accelerated 
until a sharp rise in price warned the blindest manu- 
facturer that the point of exhaustion was approach- 
ing. Germany’s coal-fields he passed over as negli- 
gible, and though he tended to the other extreme with 
reference to the United States, over-estimating the 
coal resources of that country, he regarded her rather 
as the inevitable successor to Great Britain in the in- 
dustrial leadership of the world than as an immediate 
- competitor. He could scarcely bring himself to be- 
lieve that America would persist in a protectionist 
policy, which he regarded as idiotic. “Its effect upon 
America,” he said, ‘‘is to cut it off from intercourse 
with the rest of the civilized world, to destroy its 
maritime influence, and to arrest, as far as human 
interference can arrest, the development of a great 
state. No doubt it enables a manufacturing interest 
to grow half a century or more before its time; but 
just so much as one interest is forcibly promoted so 
much are other interests forcibly held back.” 

This, no doubt, is an extreme expression of the Free 
Trade view. But there is more in it than most Amer- 
icans, or even twentieth-century Englishmen, gen- 
erally suppose. The protection of manufactures in 
America has starved the country for the benefit of 


86 POPULATION 


the towns. Everything that the farmer buys is taxed, 
while the great bulk of his produce is necessarily open 
to free competition. The result is that capital and labor 
are diverted from the production of food and cotton 
and wool to the production of manufactured articles, 
and the evils which the world and, in the long run, 
America too, has to fear through the Law of Diminish- 
ing Returns are artificially accelerated by state action.? 

Though Jevons, like the other Free-traders of his 
time, expected other countries to follow the example 
of Britain and abolish their import taxes, he recog- 
nized that this was by no means certain; and he made 
a forecast of the effect which the opposite policy would 
have upon our welfare. 


“The rate of our progress and exhaustion,’ he said, ‘‘must 
depend greatly upon the legislation of colonies and foreign 
States. Should France avert to a less enlightened commer- 
cial policy; should Europe maintain or extend a prohibitory 
system; should the Northern States succeed in erecting a per- 
nanent Morrill tariff for the benefit of Pennsylvanian manu- 


1Jn 1921 an extraordinary twist has been given to American’ 
tariff policy by the growing political power of the farmers. The 
support of the “agricultural block”’ in Congress for a protectionist 
policy has been bought by high protective taxes upon wheat, 
cotton, fruits, wool and practically all the other farm products. 
As, however, America still exports the more important of these 
commodities, the import taxes upon them are purely make- 
believe, and the effect of this development is not, at present, 
great. The important fact is that American farming interests 
are making themselves felt in Federal politics and claiming, not 
free trade, but protection! Thus the manufacturing industry 
which has been forced into rapid growth in the protectionist 
hothouse may be checked and hampered by artificial restrictions 
upon the supply of food and raw materials. 


COAL AND IRON 87 


facturers; and should the tendency of all our colonies to- 
wards Protection increase, the progress of trade may indeed 
be vastly retarded. Under these circumstances the present 
rapid rate of our growth may soon be somewhat checked. 
The introduction of railways, the repeal of the Corn Laws, 
the sudden settlement of our Australian colonies, may prove 
exceptional events. Then, after a period of somewhat pain- 
ful depression, we may fall into a lower rate of progress, that 
can be maintained for a lengthened period, passing out of 
sight. 


There is something almost uncanny in the fore- 
sight exhibited in this passage. Europe, America and 
the British Dominions have, as we know, persisted in 
their policy of protection for manufactures and the 
result has corresponded closely with that anticipated 
by Jevons. The lower rate of increase in the consump- 
tion of British coal is at present attributable to the 
competition of other industrial communities, rather 
than to the approaching exhaustion of.our coal-mines. 


§ 4. The World’s Coal Reserves. At the end of last 
century the world production of coal averaged about 
six hundred millions of tons a year. By 19138, the out- 
put had doubled. Of the twelve hundred millions of 
tons produced in that year, over 40 per cent were 
raised in the United States, about 24 per cent in Great 
Britain and about 15 per cent in Germany. The world’s 
total reserves of hard coal are estimated at about four 
billions (4,000,000,000,000) of tons; enough for more 
than three thousand years at the present rate of con- 
sumption. About half of these reserves are attributed 
to the United States; a quarter to China, and rather 
more than a fifth to Europe. Within Europe, pre-war 


88 POPULATION 


Germany claimed more than half, and Britain a quar- 
ter of the reserves of available coal. It is said that 
American coal-fields would last, at the present. rate of 
production (not, be it noted, on Jevons’s basis of the 
rate of zncrease), for twelve to fifteen centuries. 
The great bulk of China’s coal is in the Shansi field 
in the far interior; this has only been scratched as yet, 
but it may become vastly important in years to come. 
Her more accessible mines, nearer the coast, are not 
expected to last very long, if they are thoroughly 
worked. 

On the basis of the production of coal in 1900, a 
German expert expressed the opinion that “in 100 to 
200 years the coal-fields of central France, Central 
Bohemia, the Kingdom of Saxony, and the North of 
England would be exhausted; in 250 years the other 
British coal-fields, the Waldenburg-Schalzlar coal-field, 
and that of the North of France; in 600 to 800 years 
the coal-fields of Saarbrucken, Belgium, Aachen and 
Westphalia; and in more than 1000 years the coal-fields 
of Upper Silesia.’’ ? 

A more recent estimate is that ‘‘at the rate of pro- 
duction of 1913, Britain had supplies only for five or 
six centuries, Germany for eighteen to twenty.” ” 

The divergence between these estimates need not 
detain us. The figures have no significance except as 
a broad indication of the magnitude of the supplies 
available in different parts of the world. No one would 
venture to predict the rate at which coal will be raised 
and consumed during the next fifty years. But a 


1P, Frech, quoted in Part XI of Appendices to the Final 
Report of the Royal Commission of 1901. 
2 Prof. A. J. Sargent, Coal in International Trade, p. 16. 


COAL AND IRON 89 


- variation in the rate, of course, makes all the difference 
to the length of time that the reserves will last. In 
the fifteen years before the war the world’s output 
of coal doubled. If it doubled every fifteen years until 
1995, the consumption in that year would be at a rate 
which, if continued, would exhaust the world’s sup- 
posed reserves in about one hundred years, instead of 
spreading them over three thousand years! 

It is obvious, therefore, that the rate of increase in 
the consumption of coal must decline before many 
years have passed, not only in Great Britain, but in 
America also, and in the world as a whole. The spirit 
of man is so competitive that this fact is likely to be 
received quite calmly, if not with jubilation, while the 
relative decline of one’s own country would give rise 
to alarm. Progress is measured not by any absolute 
standard of well-being, but by a relative superiority 
over other countries. There is perhaps some justifi- 
cation for this method of calculation in the mechan- 
ism of international trade. | 

Even from this point of view, however, the posi- 
tion of Europe in general and of Great Britain in par- 
ticular is a disquieting one. For, while it is quite pos- 
sible that the mines of America may be exhausted as 
rapidly as those of Europe, the “height to which she 
may rise’’ (to use Jevons’s phrase) greatly exceeds that 
which can beattained by the Old World. She is thought 
to possess at least half the reserves of hard coal, and 
over 90 per cent of the reserves of lignite. She is 
already responsible for nearly half the world’s produc- 
tion of the former commodity. A large part of her 
supplies are easily raised; so that just before the war 
the output per person employed in the coal-mining 


90 POPULATION 


industry was nearly 680 tons in a year in the United 
States, as against 260 tons in Great Britain and 270 in 
Germany. The war increased this advantage con- 
siderably; Germany’s coal production being, of course, 
completely disorganized by the Peace Treaty, while 
British costs quadrupled and American costs only 
doubled, between 1913 and 1921. 


§ 5. The Export Trade in Coal. Since American coal 
can at present be raised so much more cheaply than 
British coal, it might be supposed that America was 
now in a position to capture the whole of the export 
trade in coal. This, however, does not necessarily 
-follow. The question of shipping freights is extremely 
important with respect to so bulky a commodity. 
The distance of America from European markets thus 
places a handicap upon that country in competing 
with Great Britain there, which may counterbalance 
her advantage in initial costs; while other markets, 
such as those of South America and the Far East, 
may be preserved to Great Britain by another factor 
upon which Jevons laid much emphasis. Great Brit- 
ain still imports large quantities of bulky commodi- 
ties—food-stuffs and raw materials—and, as the world 
settles down, shipowners are again finding it necessary 
to carry British coal abroad at low freights, as make- 
weight or back-carriage. 

Even if Great Britian retains the world of her pre- 
war export of coal in bulk, however, she must still 
feel the competition of American coal very keenly 
through its use in industry. If coal is in future to be 
as important a factor in the production of manufac- 
tured articles as it has been in the past, it will be diffi- 


COAL AND IRON OL 


cult for Europe to hold its own against the New 
World. But it is sometimes said that the influence of 
coal in the world is waning. Rival sources of energy 
are coming into prominence. What, then, are the 
known substitutes for coal? How will these affect the 
distribution of the world’s wealth? ‘These are ques- 
tions which will naturally occur to the reader, and 
they must be answered as far as our present knowl- 
edge permits. 


§ 6. Substitutes for Coal. Oil and water are the two 
sources of power most talked about nowadays. 

In 1873 the world production of crude oil was less 
than 1,500,000 tons; in 1918 it was rather over fifty 
millions of tons; in 1920 it was well over ninety mil- 
lions of tons. The United States produced 64 per 
cent of the world’s supply in 1920 and Mexico 22 per 
cent. The actual exhaustion of America’s oil-fields 
is said to be in sight. An official estimate gives them 

twenty years of life. The reserves of coal are esti- 
~ mated in centuries. The life of an oil-well is reckoned 
in months. While, therefore, there are no reliable 
data as to the world’s oil resources, it seems likely 
that we may be reduced to the use of shale-oil long 
before our coal reserves are seriously depleted. Mean- 
while, the United States have the temporary advan- 
tage in this fuel also, and Mexico, her near neighbor, 
will be able to supplement her supplies. 

In water-power America has not so great an advan- 
tage over Europe. An official estimate for the United 
States in 1912 gives a maximum of over sixty mil- 
lion horse-power and a minimum of over thirty mil- 
lions. The horse-power of Niagara is about six millions, 


92 POPULATION 


and this is the equivalent of about thirty millions: of 
tons of coal a year. The total water-power that the 
States claim to possess would, therefore, be the equiv- 
alent of from 300 to 150 millions of tons of coal a 
year. It is thought by some British authorities that 
this estimate is very excessive. The most conservative, — 
however, would allow that North America as a whole 
has effective reserves of water-power equivalent to 
the saving of 100 to 150 millions of tons of coal a year 
on the present basis of consumption. This represents 
no more than a quarter of the present annual pro- 
duction of coal by the United States; and when we 
remember that a large part of the water-power is in 
the far west and that it cannot be economically dis- 
tributed far from its source, it will appear that even 
America’s great rivers and waterfalls do not provide 
a satisfactory substitute for coal. 

The whole of Central and Western Europe together 
has probably from twenty to thirty million horse-power 
available in water energy; the equivalent of at least a 
hundred million tons of coal a year. The Alps and the 
mountains of Norway and Sweden are the chief sources 
of power. Germany is said to possess only a million and 
a half and Great Britain only one million horse-power. 

As in America, so in Europe, the water-power is 
mainly located at long distances from the coal-fields 
and therefore from the present centres of industry. 
These distances, are, however, much greater in Amer- 
ica than in Kurope, and the countries which converge 
upon the Alps have therefore a potential source of 
power which may partly compensate them for their 
inferiority in reserves of coal. 

1 Prof A. J. Sargent, Coal in International Trade, p. 64. 


COAL AND IRON 93 


No consolation of this kind is open to Great Britain, 
whose insignificant reserves of water-power are scat- 
tered about in the least accessible parts of the island; 
unless, indeed, a way is found of harnessing the tides 
which ebb and flow unceasingly around her shores. 

In general, it may be said that the resources of science 
and industry are not likely to be defeated by the 
problem of devising some adequate substitute for coal 
to carry on the business of the world when that good 
workman is at last exhausted by his labors. Jevons 
saw no prospect of prolonging the life of coal by econ- 
omies in the use of fuel, because the fruits of such 
economies were invariably taken out at once in the ex- 
tension of industry. No doubt he was right in the cir- 
cumstances of his own period. As coal grows scarcer, 
however, and its price rises, economies will be forced 
upon us. Industries which would otherwise have to 
close down through inability to meet the increasing 
cost of coal will be maintained by electricity. Coal 
will still, no doubt, have to be used to generate the 
electricity, where water-power is not available; but 
a considerable saving in coal will be effected by such 
means; ? and it will be a real saving, by which the date 
of ultimate exhaustion may be indefinitely postponed. 

Though, however, it would be silly to be much dis- 
turbed by the fear that the world may one day be de- 
prived of fuel, the problems raised by the relative dis- 

1 “Tf power supply in the United Kingdom were dealt with on 
comprehensive lines and advantage taken of the most modern 
engineering development, the saving in coal throughout the 
country would, in the near future, amount to 55,000,000 tons per 
annum on the present output of manufactured products.” 


‘Final Report of the Coal Conservation Committee to the Min- 
istry of Reconstruction,” Cd. 9084 (1918). 


94 POPULATION 


advantage of Europe in regard to fuel at the present 
time are very real and pressing. In order that we 
may see this disadvantage in its true proportions, it 
is necessary to take account of another mineral, coal’s 
great ally in the domination of the world—iron. 


§ 7. Iron. It used to be thought by large numbers of 
Englishmen that the presence of coal and iron near to- 
gether in various parts of Britain was specially arranged 
by Providence for the convenience of the inhabitants. 
Certainly this proximity gave the iron trade of Great 
Britain a good start and helped to build the railways 
and ships which now carry the ore to the fuel from 
comparatively distant places. At present, however, 
Providence seems to be on the side of the United States. 
About 85 per cent of the ore mined in that country 
comes from the shores of Lake Superior and is carried 
in steamers down to Lake Erie, where it is either met 
by the coal or forwarded by rail to Pittsburg. In 1913 
the United States produced over 40 per cent of the 
world’s pig-iron. Between 1900 and 1913 her output. 
rose from fourteen to over thirty millions of tons, while 
that of Germany rose from eight to twenty millions 
and that of Great Britain from nine to a little over 
ten millions. Pre-war Germany obtained most of her 
iron-ore from Lorraine and the rest from Luxemburg, 
the Briey district in France, Sweden and Spain. Great 
Britain produced two-thirds of the ore she consumed 
and imported the rest from Sweden and Spain. 
Americans claim that they have about seventy-five 
thousand millions of tons of high-grade ores in the 
Lake Superior district, and three or four times that 
quantity of lower-grade ores. At the present rate of 


COAL AND IRON 95 


consumption these would last for three or four thou- 
sand years. 

In Europe, the geologists estimate that there are 
over fifty thousand millions of tons of workable ore. 
Most of this, however, is not of high grade. It is, of 
course, the richest and most easily worked deposits 
which are exhausted first. There are, for instance, 
very large reserves of low-grade ores in Great Britain, 
which we may fall back upon when the richer ores of 
Sweden and Spain are so far exhausted that their price 
becomes prohibitive. The fact that we at present 
import a large part of our supply shows that the 
difference in quality is sufficiently important to out- 
weigh the cost of carrying a very heavy freight. 

It will be seen that in respect to iron, as well as coal, 
America has natural advantages over Europe which 
are likely to increase in the years to come. It is in- 
. evitable that in the production of manufactured arti- 
cles in which these two minerals are both important 
factors, the teeming population of the Old World 
should feel the difficulty of competing against the 
immense resources of the New for the food and raw 
materials upon which life itself depends. 


§ 8. Great Britain’s Problem. Central Europe is for 
the time being submerged in the mire of post-war 
difficulties; no one can foresee what the future of those 
populous districts may be. But Great Britain is 
struggling back to her normal economic life. Let us 
then consider how Great Britain stands in relation to 
the supplies of food, fuel and raw material upon which 
she depends in a unique degree for the support of her 
great population. 


96 POPULATION 


For nearly two-thirds of our food we depend upon 
6ther countries. The supply, however, is elastic, 
that is to say, a slight increase in the price is likely to 
call forth considerably increased supplies. For these 
great imports of food we have to pay by our exports, 
which consist mainly of manufactured goods, coal and 
services (shipping, banking, insurance, etc.). For our 
manufactures we require raw materials, most of which 
we have to import. The most essential of these are 
cotton, which is rising in price and inelastic in supply; 
wool, which is fairly plentiful at present but depends 
upon great open spaces in the world and is subject to 
encroachments by arable and dairy farming; iron ore, 
of which we import from a third to a half of our supply, 
though we have great deposits of low-grade ores in our 
own soil; and coal, which we produce ourselves and 
export largely in bulk in addition to using it as a most 
important ingredient in our manufactures. 

The question which we have to consider is whether 
a rapidly increasing population can be supported by 
industries which depend upon imported raw mate- 
rials at rising prices, and coal produced at home with 
increasing difficulty, in competition with similar in- 
dustries in America which have greater natural ad- 
vantages. 

Before we can answer that question, we must com- 
prehend the nature of international trade. Two coun- 
tries trade with one another when they have different 
comparative advantages in producing goods. Tf a 
given quantity of capital and labor could produce 
just twice as much wheat and twice as much pig-iron 
in America as in England, there would be no point in 
trading in those two commodities between the two 


COAL AND IRON 97 


countries. But if the same quantities of capital and 
labor produced twice as much wheat and only one and 
~ a half times as much pig-iron in America, it would be 
profitable to both countries to exchange American 
wheat for British pig-iron. This is a simple illustration 
of what is called the Law of Comparative Costs. The 
important point is that a country may, and often does, 
export goods in the production of which it is at an ab- 
solute disadvantage as compared with the country to 
which it sends them. 

International trade is, in practice, a complex series 
of operations in which many nations are involved. The 
simple case that we have taken will, however, enable 
us to tackle the question with which we are now con- 
cerned. 

The answer is that Great Britain can continue to 
compete with America on certain terms. Hitherto, as 
we have seen, her international trade has been carried 
on in comparatively favorable circumstances. The 
rapid development of new sources of food and raw 
materials has enabled her industries to expand and at 
the same time to exchange their products on increas- 
ingly advantageous terms, with agricultural countries. 
Now there are signs of a change, and Great Britain 
may have to adjust herself to new conditions. If she 
cannot maintain her trade by superior skill or greater 
energy and enterprise, she must do so by cutting costs, 
including labor costs. It serves no good purpose to 
ignore unpleasant facts. A fall in the standard of liv- 
ing is one of the greatest calamities which a nation may 
have to face. But the less it is foreseen the greater 
is the misery to which it gives rise. The danger is 
that the population of Europe in general and of Great 


98 POPULATION 


Britain in particular may go on increasing almost 
automatically when the field for employment on a 
decent level of subsistence is contracting. Emigration, 
as we shall see in the next chapter, offers a very poor 
measure of relief under such circumstances. But a 
well-organized nation that looks ahead and lays its 
plans well should be able to adjust itself to changing 
circumstances with the minimum of suffering and 
hardship. 

Jevons put upon his title-page the following quota- 
tion from Adam Smith: 

“The progressive state is in reality the cheerful and 
the hearty state to all the different orders of the so- 
ciety; the stationary is dull; the declining melancholy.’’ 

No doubt there is a measure of truth in the state- 
ment. But the progressive state is also one of dis- 
content and inequality, when the rich tend to grow 
richer and the poor relatively, if not absolutely, poorer. 
We have been so busy accumulating wealth and rush- 
ing about the earth in vehicles of increasing velocity 
that we have paid too little attention to the wise use 
of the things we have acquired. The stationary state, 
if it is to that we are coming, may prove to be not dull, 
but tranquil; a state in which we may for the first time 
taste the pleasures of a true civilization. ‘There is 
plenty of hope for the future, if we face the situation 
in which we find ourselves with courage and wisdom. 
But one thing is essential if a stationary state is to be 
tolerable—it must be accompanied by a stationary 
population. 


CHAPTER VI 
THE GROWTH OF POPULATION 


“Desire not a multitude of unprofitable children.” 


Ecclesvasticus xvi, 1. 


§ 1. Changes in the Birth-rate. ‘Russia being mentioned 
as likely to become a great empire, by the rapid increase of 
population: Johnson, ‘Why, Sir, I see no prospect of their pro- 
pagating more. They can have no more children than they 
can get. I know of no way to make them breed more than 
they do. It is not from reason and prudence that. people 
marry, but from inclination. A man is poor; he thinks, 
“T cannot be worse, and so I’ll e’en take Peggy.” ’ Boswell, 
‘But have not nations been more populous at one period than 
another?’ . Johnson, ‘Yes, Sir; but that has been owing to the 
people being less thinned at one period than another, whether 
by emigrations, war, or pestilence, not by their being more 
or less prolifick. Births at all times bear the same proportion 
to the same number of people.’”’ 


Hazlitt put this quotation in the forefront of his 
Reply to Malthus. How he thought it damaged the 
Malthusian doctrine is not clear, but he evidently 
regarded it as an example of the highest wisdom. Mr. 
G. Udny Yule, the statistician, on the other hand, says 
that to him ‘‘this remarkable dictum appears to be 
contradicted by the experience of every nation for 

99 


100 POPULATION — 


which we have records over a sufficient period of time 
and of sufficient accuracy.” } 

Now statistics, especially ‘vital statistics,’ as the 
figures about births, deaths and marriages, are called— 
are full of pitfalls; and the present writer is by no means 
anxious to challenge a statistician upon his own ground. 
No doubt Mr. Yule is right in denying the accuracy 
of Dr. Johnson’s statement. Nevertheless, it seems to 
have been inspired by the robust common sense for 
which the speaker was conspicuous, and, allowing for 
that exaggeration which is permissible in conversation, 
to have been broadly true. Since about 1880 it has 
ceased to be true of countries under the influence of 
Western civilization. That is a fact of the greatest 
importance which we shall consider in the latter part 
of this chapter. The change is due to influences of 
which Dr. Johnson knew nothing, and it is hardly ad- 
missible as evidence against him. 

Going back for a moment to Gregory King, the in- 
genious Lancaster Herald, from whose observations 
upon the state of England in 1696 some extracts were 
given in Chapter I, we may note that his estimate of 
the yearly births of the kingdom amounted to one in 
twenty-eight of the total population. In order to 
bring it into comparison with more recent figures, we 
may translate this estimate into 35.75 per 1000. 

Now the civil registration of births was not estab- 
lished until 1837, and registration was not compulsory 
until 1874, but the following figures are likely to be 
more accurate than those of Gregory King. ‘These 
are the annual birth-rates recorded for England and 
Wales: 

1 The Fall of the Birth-rate by G. Udny Yule, M. A. 


THE GROWTH OF POPULATION 101 


Births per bask living 


Period : at all ages. 
1841-50 . : } . 84.6 
1851-55 : : . 33.9 
1856-60. z ; . 84.4 
1861-65. , : La ws F 
1866-70 . : ; . 89.3 
1871-75. : AH een th fa97 3) 
1876-80 . : i ilies 8a 
1881-85 . ‘ : . 33.9 
1886-90. : ‘ . dla 
1891-95... ; ; . 30.5 
1896-00 . ; , Pe Ry at Bs 
1901-05. ; { . 28.2 
1906-10 . : d ZO 
1911-15); : : wh 20.0 


Statisticians warn us against attaching too much 
importance to the rise in the birth-rate before 1876, 
as it is uncertain how far it may be due be to increas- 
ing completeness of registration. With the fall after 
1880 we shall be concerned later. The point to which 
the reader’s attention should be given at present is the 
remarkable correspondence between the estimate of 
Gregory King of the birth-rate in 1696 with the rates 
actually recorded between 1841 and 1880. 

' It is true, of course, that small changes in the num- 
ber of births per 1000 of the population make a very 
considerable difference in the total population. Be- 
tween 1861 and 1871 the number of persons in Great 
Britain increased from twenty-three millions to twenty- 
six millions. If, therefore, one more baby was born 
each year to every thousand people living, the addi- 
tional births in those ten years amounted to about a 


102 POPULATION 


quarter of a million. Nevertheless, when compared 
with the change in the death-rate this possible varia- 
tion in the birth-rate is slight, and we are cautioned 
not to assume that it actually took place. 


§ 2. Changes in the Death-rate. Gregory King said that 
the annual burials in his time were about one in thirty- 
two, and to these he added another ten thousand 
deaths per annum as an allowance for plagues, wars 
and shipwrecks. This addition makes the estimate 
of deaths about one in thirty, or 33.3 per 1000, 
nearly equal to the birth-rate during the nineteenth 
century! 

Compare this with the annual death-rate since 1851: 


Deaths per 1000 Deaths of Infants under 


Period living at all ages one year per 1000 births 
1851-55. ey cit fn tie . 156 
1856-60. aly 2 Les ANE fy Wa b2 
1861-65. Oa Nt tie ne asa 
1866-70. 2 ona 2 Ais yi ey cted aay, 
ISFIS 154, He, eeuk) ane . 1538 
1876-80 kh ee AOS a ek a 
1881-85. » ADA Se. hoe 
1886-90. Rd Bae Soa . 145 
1891-95. mo he Re om PME NED 
LS8Q6—00 7 it RN Gis i da Nun 
1901-05 . PAIS AS Ree 1 188 
1906-10. ma C. Miy aa PE Ly: 
1911-15, ee a a eden ORE 


It will be seen that if King’s estimate was approxi- 
mately correct, there was a fall of one-third in the 
death-rate between 1696 and 1851, and that it has de- 


THE GROWTH OF POPULATION 103 


clined continuously since 1861-65, making altogether 
another fall of over one-third. The figures for the 
deaths of infants under one year are also given, be- 
cause it is among these that the highest mortality 
occurs. It is remarkable that there was no great 
improvement in this respect until the turn of the 
century. 


§ 3. The Relative Influence of Birth-rate and Death- 
rate upon the Growth of Population. Now it is possible 
that Gregory King’s estimates may have been hope- 
lessly wrong. He may have grossly overestimated 
both the birth-rate and the death-rate. If, indeed, he 
erred in one, he must have erred in both, for the growth 
of population in the seventeenth and eighteenth cen- 
turies corresponds roughly with the rate of increase 
which would result from his figures. In 1600 the pop- 
ulation of England and Wales is thought to have been 
about five millions; in 1700 about five and a half mil- 
lions; in 1750 about six and a half millions; in 1800 
eight million nine hundred thousand; in 1901 thirty- 
two and a half millions. It is clear that the birth- 
rate and death-rate must have been nearly equal 
throughout the seventeenth century, and that since 
1750 there must have been a great increase in the 
-birth-rate or a great decline in the death-rate, or 
both. 

Sweden is the only country that has kept reliable 
vital statistics for a long period. It will be useful 
therefore to look at the evidence which that country 
can give respecting variations in the birth-rate. The 
following are the legitimate births per 1000 married 
women aged 15 to 50 in Sweden: 


104 POPULATION 


1756-65. NOE 1836-45. . 235 
1766-75. . 240 1846-55. . 241 
1110-8004), . 242 1856-65. ; 248 
1786-95. . 245 1866-75. . 235 
1796-05. es 1876-85. . 240 
1806-15. . 232 1886-95. yatisaeea 
1816-25. . 253 1896-05. , aa 
1826-35 . . 240 


It will be seen that though the figures are not con- 
stant, the variations are irregular and inconsiderable 
until the sudden drop in the last period. 

Sweden being a peaceful and established country, 
with a large emigration may reasonably be expected to 
have a steady birth-rate. Let us, therefore, take Aus-’ 
tralasia as a final illustration on this point. Here are 
the birth-rate and death-rate for forty years: 


Period Birth-rate Death-rate Natural Increase 
1861-65 41.92 16.75 25.17 
1866-70 39.84 15.62 24.22 
1871-75 37.34 15.26 22.08 
1876-80 36.38 15.04 21.34 
1881-85 30.21 14.79 20.42 
1886-90 34.43 13.95 20.48 
1891-95) 3152 12.74 18.78 
1896-99 27 .35 12.39 14.96 
1901-09 26.35 — — 


Here it will be seen that the birth-rate has declined 
more rapidly and to a greater extent than the death- 
rate. Dr. Johnson’s dictum ceases apparently to have 
any validity whatever when Australasia is considered. 
There are, however, special circumstances to account 


THE GROWTH OF POPULATION 105 


for the high level of this birth-rate in the years 1861 to 
_ 1875, which justify us in regarding it as abnormal. 
There was a wave of immigration into Australia in the 
fifties and ’sixties, and it is undeniable that healthy 
immigrants cause a temporary increase in the birth- 
rate and decrease in the death-rate. This result is due 
to a change in the composition of the population. The 
birth-rate Jumps up because a larger proportion of the 
people are at the child-producing ages. The death-rate 
declines because the population as a whole is younger 
than in established countries. It will be observed 
that between 1880 and 1890, when the effect of the 
great immigration had worked itself out, the birth- 
rate became comparable to that of England and Wales. 
It is much to be regretted that America has not re- 
corded its vital statistics until quite recently, since 
they might have thrown a flood of light upon that 
ereat boom in population which impressed Malthus 
and his contemporaries at the end of the eighteenth 
century. 
Without going further into the evidence, it may be 
tentatively asserted that the tremendous increase in 
the population of Europe and America during the 
last century and a half is attributable far more to a 
diminished death-rate than to a change in the birth- 
rate. ‘Poverty,’ said Adam Smith, in a passage 
quoted above (in Chapter I), “. . . seems even to be 
favorable to generation. <A half-starved Highland 
woman frequently bears more than twenty children, 
while a pampered fine lady is often incapable of bear- 
ing any, and is generally exhausted by two or three. 
... But poverty, though it does not prevent the genera- 
tion, is extremely unfavorable to the rearing of chil- 


106 POPULATION 


dren. . . . It isnot uncommon, I have been frequently 
told, in the Highlands of Scotland, for a mother who 
had borne twenty children not to have two alive... .” 


§ 4. Preventive Checks to Population. Curiously enough, 
Western civilization seems, until the last few years, 
to have diminished what Malthus. called ‘‘the pre- 
ventive check”’ to population and to have encour- 
aged people, especially poor people, to bring more 
children into the world than the soil could support. 
Mr. Carr-Saunders has collected! a mass of evidence 
showing that everywhere among primitive races either 
abortion, infanticide or prolonged abstention from 
intercourse are practiced in such a degree as greatly to 
restrict increase in population. Up to the medieval 
period one or other of these methods was prevalent in 
all countries. They were then replaced, in Europe, 
by postponement of marriage. The social customs 
throughout Europe in the Middle Ages seems to have 
tended to discourage matrimony in early life. The 
unmarried laborer lived at the farmhouse or with his 
parents, and had to wait for a cottage to become va- 
cant through death before he could set up an estab- 
lishment of his own. Migration was not generally 
permitted, nor were the opportunities of employment 
away from home such as to encourage wanderings. The 
servants of the nobility, it is true, were an exception 
to this rule. They were sometimes moved about, but, 
like domestic servants nowdays, they tended to be a 
celibate class. Under these circumstances most men 
and women married rather late in life, and many did 
not have a chance of marrying at all. The religious 


1 In The Population Problem, by A. M. Carr-Saunders. 


THE GROWTH OF POPULATION 107 


- Orders became a refuge for some of these involuntary 
celibates, and drew others, who could have married, 
into their folds. 

Perhaps the preventive checks of primitive society 
became unnecessary through the accidental growth 
of these social restraints, and the stationary popula- 
tion of the Middle Ages caused men to forget the mis- 
eries of over-population. Perhaps the teaching of the 
Catholic Church in favor of large families and the 
dictum of Luther, ‘‘Let God provide,” played a dom- 
inant part in social history. Perhaps the demand for 
soldiers to fight the battles of kings and emperors led 
to a relaxation of the customs which interfered with 
marriage. Or perhaps the growth of industries, other 
than agriculture, opened the door for migration and 
created a new demand for labor. All these influences 
may indeed have played a part in bringing about that 
unrestrained birth-rate which Dr. Johnson regarded as 
normal to humanity. 


§ 5. Under-Population. It may here be asked why we 
so seldom speak of the evil of under-population. It 
is obvious, for instance, that America is a much better 
country to live in now that it has a hundred millions 
of inhabitants than it was when there were only a few 
thousands, or even when there were a few millions. 
Was it not under-populated, then? 

The answer is that the power of population is so 
great that it will very rapidly fill up any opening which 
may appear for its expansion. Between 1906 and 1911 
the population of the world increased at such a rate 
that it would double in about sixty years; and it has 
been calculated that, at the same rate, the present 


108 POPULATION 


world population of 1,694,000,000 might proceed from 
one couple in 1782 years. America is really a strik- 
ing example of the reproductive energy of the human 
race. -The development of a country takes time. To 
dump a hundred millions, or even ten millions, of 
people on the virgin soil of America all at once would 
have caused the death by starvation of the great ma- 
jority of them. The settlers had to be provided with 
implements, and an immense and intricate mechanism 
had to grow up for supplying them with the products 
of Europe while they were developing the resources 
of a new continent. At every stage in the evolution 
of America enough people were forthcoming both there 
and in Europe to facilitate the greatest possible rate 
of progress. The opening up of a new source of sub- 
sistence has called forth an immense increase in num- 
bers not only in America itself, but in Europe also. 
Could there be a more impressive demonstration of 
the truth of the Malthusian doctrine? It is quite true 
that many parts of the world have become better to 
live in as the number of inhabitants has increased, 
but this has been due, not to the increase alone, but 
to the improved methods of production which man in 
co-operation has learned to practice. At each stage 
of development the population has been at least as 
great as could be maintained without depressing the 
standard of life. 


§ 6. A Falling Birth-rate. Now if, as has been suggested 
in the foregoing chapters, the extraordinary demand 
for population, occasioned by the development of 
America, has been largely met, how is the rate of in- 
crease to be checked? Must we choose between the 


THE GROWTH OF POPULATION 109 


primitive check of infanticide, the medieval check of 
late marriage and enforced celibacy, or the positive 
check of a high death-rate, especially among infants? 
A happier solution than any of these seems to be in- 
dicated by the statistics quoted at the beginning of 
this chapter. From them we learnt that the birth-rate 
in England and Wales has fallen since 1876 by about 
one-third, while the death-rate has fallen almost as 
much as the birth-rate. The diminished mortality 
has nearly compensated so far for the smaller number 
of births, the “natural rate of increase’’—that is, the 
excess of births over deaths—having fallen only from 
a maximum of 14 for the decade 1871-80 to 11.8 for 
1900-10. The death-rate, however, cannot fall to 
zero, unless Godwin’s dream is realized and we live 
for ever; so if the birth-rate continues to fall, the rate 
of increase must diminish and eventually become a 
rate of decrease. 

This phenomenon of a falling birth-rate has not been 
confined to England, but has been experienced to some 
extent in every country in Europe, and even in most 
parts of the New World where Europeans have settled. 
In France the birth-rate has been falling since the be- 
ginning of the nineteenth century. In 1811-20 the 
average rate was 31.8 in that country; in 1841-50 it 
was 27.4; in 1871-80 it was 25.4; and in 1901-10 it 
was 20.6. The population in France has been practi- 
cally stationary for the last thirty years. This is al- 
together an exceptional case. France being to a large 
extent a self-supporting country has stood aside from 
the influence of American expansion which has stim- 
uulated the rate of increase in most other countries. 
The French are a saving people, and the instinct of 


. 


110 POPULATION 


accumulation inclines men to have small families. 
Moreover, the law which provides for a division of 
landed property at death is said to exert a consider- 
able influence in the same direction, since men do not 
wish their farms to be cut up into small parcels. 

In many other countries a fall in the birth-rate has 
been a conspicuous feature of the last forty or fifty 
years. Between 1871-80 and 1901-10 the rate fell 
in Denmark from 31.4'to 28.6; in Norway, from 31.0 
to 27.4; in Sweden, from 30.5 to 25.8; in Finland, from 
37.0 to 31.2; in Austria, from 39.0 to 34.7; in Switzer- 
land from 30.7 to 26.9; in Germany, from 39.1 to 32.9; 
in Holland, from 36.2 to 30.5; in Belgium, from 32.3 
to 26.1; in Italy, from 36.9 to 32.7; in Australia, from 
36.1 to 26.5; and in New Zealand, from 40.5 to 26.8. 

The United States, as we have already remarked, does 
not possess records of births, deaths and marriages, but 
the approximate figures for the total population are avail- 
able for each decade since 1800. They are as follows: 


Millions Increase per cent. 
1800. ‘ AO 655 ae : a 
1810. . 2 Be Bat hey De : . 36 
1820 9.6 33 
1830. : sur ah 29 34 
1840. " ie fess Rae . 30d 
L350 i: ‘ RM | \ : . 36 
1860 . Bie a CN a 36 
1870. j UM SSO Ty, 6 iN pee 
1880... ‘ By RAO TL Bell . 380 
1890... ‘ Og | ORs gee 
1900 . i ae RAC ahs “inal 
1910 4% d OO) ied | 


1920 . ‘ LODE (0% : ne 


THE GROWTH OF POPULATION 111 


Without going into further figures, it may be confi- 
dently asserted that this falling off in the rate of in- 
crease cannot be explained, though it may be slightly 
modified, by changes in the immigration rate. There 
is no doubt that the general decline in the birth-rate is 
effective in the United States, as well as in Europe and 
the British Dominions. 


§ 7. Some Explanations of the Decline in the Birth-rate. 
Returning to the position in England, all statisticians 
seem to be agreed that this declining birth-rate is 
mainly due to a decrease in the number of children in 
the average family. This may be partly caused by 
postponement of marriage; but, while about 17. per 
cent may be attributed to this cause, about 70 per 
cent is due to a decrease in the fertility of married 
women. 

Here the agreement ends. Everyone is entitled to 
his own opinion as to the cause of the decline, which 
all admit has taken place. Mr. Yule has an interesting 
theory that the birth-rate falls in sympathy with fall- 
ing prices. ‘That the nexus is economic, and that it 
probably operates via psychology rather than directly 
through physiology.’”? He doubts—in fact, he dis- 
believes—its being wholly conscious, or, as the phrase 
now goes, “volitional.’”’! Another statistical philos- 
opher makes the flattering suggestion that fluctuations 
in human fertility are analogous to those outbursts 
of vital energy which lead to plagues of field-mice 
or locusts. Very little is known, apparently, about 
the causes of these exuberant manifestations, of life, 
but a similar eccentricity has been observed in some 


1The Fall of the Birth-rate, p. 39. 


112 POPULATION 


species of fish, and in this case a Norwegian scientist, 
Dr. J. Hjort, has found a satisfactory explanation. In 
1908 Dr. Hjort noticed that nearly all the cod—whose 
ages can be learned from their scales—caught by his 
countrymen were hatched in 1904. Again, in 1913 he ~ 
observed an extraordinary number of one-year-old 
cod on the coast of Norway, and the 1912 brood has 
since been found to preponderate greatly in the catches. 
Investigating this apparent fluctuation in fertility, 
Dr. Hjort discovered that the diatoms upon which the 
tiny cod feed when they first hatch out vary very 
greatly in their density; and-he believes that in the 
years 1904 and 1912 a large quantity of these diatoms 
happened to be available when the baby cod began 
to feed, with the result that an unusually large pro- 
portion survived. Now, if any explanation of this kind 
is applicable to the fieldmice and the locusts, the an- 
alogy with those interesting organisms will merely 
bring us back again to the Malthusian hypothesis that 
population increases up to the means of subsistence. 
The explanation of the falling birth-rate which is 
most widely accepted is that since 1877 the knowledge 
of the means by which married people can deliberately 
prevent the conception of children has been rapidly 
disseminated and used. There is strong circumstan- 
tial evidence in favor of this view. In 1877, Brad- 
laugh and Mrs. Besant were prosecuted for publishing 
a pamphlet written by a Dr. Knowlton, in which in- 
formation of the kind was given. ‘This trial attracted 
a tremendous amount of public interest. There can 
be no doubt that the subject-matter of the pamphlet 
received an extraordinary advertisement, or that the 
fall in the birth-rate coincides in a remarkable way 


THE GROWTH OF POPULATION 113 


_ with the date of the trial. Moreover, there is evidence 
that the practices which were thus made known for 
the first time to great numbers of people in England 
had been prevalent in France for many years before, 
and the account which has been given above of the 
motives which may have led the French people to re- 
strict their population can thus be supplemented by 
_the information that the means of doing so were avail- 
able to them. 


§ 8. Variations in the Birth-rate between Different Classes. 
If, however, we accept the view that the fall in the 
birth-rate is mainly due to the deliberate action of 
married people, we have still to consider what motives 
may have caused them to take that action in countries 
other than France during the last forty or fifty years. 
Here another factor of first-rate importance presents 
itself. The decrease in fertility has not affected all 
classes in the community equally. At the present 
time the birth-rate is lowest in what are called the 
upper and middle classes, and rises, generally speak- 
ing, inversely with the average earnings of each class in 
the community. The people, however, in certain in- 
dustries do not conform to this gradation. Textile 
workers, for instance, have as few children as the middle 
classes; while miners have the largest number of all— 
more than the unskilled laborers. The difference in 
the fertility of different classes is much greater now 
than it was fifty years ago, but there is some evidence 
that it is beginning to decrease again. In inquiring 
into the causes of a falling birth-rate we have, there- 
fore, the clue to follow that, in general, they act more 
strongly upon the rich than the poor, and that they 


114 POPULATION 


have more influence upon skilled workman, other 
than miners, than upon unskilled. 

In order to get this clue in its right perspective, 
however, it should be observed that the working 
classes have always—or, at any rate, for many years— 
married younger and had more children than the middle 
classes. An unskilled or partly skilled workman earns 
as much when he is twenty-one as he is likely to earn 
when he is forty, and his children do not get an ex- 
pensive education; but a lawyer or a doctor is seldom 
in receipt of sufficient income from his profession to 
Maintain a wife and family until he approaches thirty, 
and he may find it very difficult to educate his chil- 
dren in the way he considers necessary until he is well 
over forty. The differences between classes in the 
production of children must not therefore be regarded 
as a new development coincident with the falling 
birth-rate, though it has certainly been accentuated 
during the last forty years. The birth-rate among 
textile workers, again, has been lower than that in 
other industries for many years, and this difference 
also must therefore be discounted in following the 
clue to the recent change. 

Now, extremely poor people are notoriously care- — 
less as to the future. If they get a short burst of high 
wages, by making munitions in wartime, for instance, 
they are apt to spend recklessly and to relapse into their 
former condition as soon as the burst is over. On the 
other hand, it has frequently been noticed that when 
a community, or a class, has attained a decent stand- 
ard of life and has maintained it for a time, it is ex- 
tremely tenacious of that standard. If, then, we can 
discover that for some reason the people of this and 


THE GROWTH OF POPULATION 115 


. Other European countries have increased the number 
of things which they consider necessary to a tolerable 
existence during the period under review, we shall 
have supplied at least one reason for their smaller 
families. 

The growing wealth of Europe during the latter 
part of the nineteenth century does not in itself pro- 
vide the evidence we require, for why was not that 
wealth taken out in mere numbers, in accordance with 
the Malthusian principle? The answer seems to be 
that people decide whether or not they can afford to 
have children on a calculation of their money incomes, 
without considering changes in purchasing power; 
and that, consequently, falling prices tend to produce 
a higher standard of life instead of more children. 
Prices fell continuously and considerably during the 
eighties, and the same money incomes therefore en- 
abled people to buy more things without feeling richer, 
and they thus became accustomed to living upon a 
scale which could only be maintained with smaller 
families. | 


§ 9. Other Factors Influencing the Birth-rate. Here, then, 
is one probable cause of the fall in the birth-rate. Is 
it the sole cause? To attribute complex results to 
single causes is said to be the characteristic vice of un- 
trained and narrow minds; it is certainly a fruitful 
source of error. This population problem is highly 
complex. It depends upon human psychology, which 
may be influenced by a thousand different, and some- 
times conflicting, impulses, rational and irrational. It 
would therefore be foolish to be dogmatic about the 
matter. One can only say that certain influences have 


116 POPULATION 


been at work and that they have probably contributed 
to certain results. It is not possible, even, to discuss all 
the evidence, or to state fully the case for the view 
which has been put forward above. The importance 


attributed to the deliberate limitation of families as a | 


cause of the falling birth-rate receives, for instance, 
some additional justification from statistics showing 
that Roman Catholics tend to have more children than 
Protestants in similar circumstances, for the Roman 
Church has strenuously opposed the practice of birth 
control. It is not necessary, however, to labor the 
point, for the reader who wishes to reach any final 
conclusion will pursue the subject far beyond the 
scope of this handbook. 

Another factor which may have had an enormous 
influence upon the birth-rate is the change in the so- 
cial status of women. Mill, who is much more illumin- 
ating upon population problems than the later -econo- 
mists, remarked that 


“it is seldom by the choice of the wife that families are too 
numerous; on her devolves (along with all the physical suffer- 
ing and at least a full share of the privations) the whole of 
the intolerable domestic drudgery resulting from the excess, 
To be relieved from it would be hailed as a blessing by mul- 
titudes of women who now never venture to urge such a claim, 
but who would urge it, if supported by the moral feelings of 
the community. . . . Let them cease to be confined by cus- 
tom to one physical function as their means of living and 
their source of influence, and they would have for the first 
time an equal voice with men in what concerns that function: 
and of all the improvements in reserve for mankind which it is 
now possible to foresee, none might be expected to be So fer- 
tile as this in almost every kind of moral and social benefit.” 


= 


THE GROWTH OF POPULATION 117 


Here, then, is a social force which may well have 
_ played as big a part as the rise in the standard of life 
in’ diminishing the birth-rate and, with it, the death- 
rate. ‘The position of women, especially in the middle 
classes where the limitation of families has been most 
marked, has changed greatly during the last fifty years. 
Not only have they entered into competition with men 
in many callings, but the subtler difference of status in 
home life is even more significant. Anyone who has 
read an early Victorian novel, or even the works of 
Dickens, will know, if he be not devoid of imagination, 
that Muill’s forecast of the benefits to be derived from 
the change was not in the least exaggerated. ‘“ Almost 
every kind of moral and social benefit’? may, indeed, 
spring from the admission of women to an equal share 
with men in the direction of human affairs; and not 
the least of these may prove to be a rational limita- 
tion of the birth-rate. It is possible also that the small 
families of the textile workers may be accounted for by 
the status of women as wage-earners among them; 
while the position of women in the isolated mining 
districts may equally explain the enormous birth-rate 
there. 


$10. The Importance of the Decline in the Birth-rate. 
- To whatever causes we may attribute the fall in the 
birth-rate, the most important fact from the econo- 
mic standpoint is that it has fallen and is likely to fall 
still more. Changes in the size of the population are 
necessary from time to time, because changes take 
place in the natural resources upon which human be- 
ings depend. The necessary adjustment may be 
forced upon us, with infinite pain and misery. through 


118 POPULATION 


the death-rate, or it may be brought about, if man 
will exercise his prerogative as a rational creature,: 
through the birth-rate. It is an obvious fact that the’ 
same rate of increase may be produced in a community’ 
by a high birth-rate combined with a high death-rate’ 
as by a low birth-rate and a low death-rate; but it is 
difficult to imagine anything that could make more 
difference to the health and happiness of the people 
than the change from the one to the other. Statisti- 
cians may talk coldly of a high rate of infant mortality 
being ‘compensated for” by a high birth-rate. The 
same idea expressed in terms of human misery; of so 
many dead babies and an equal number of mothers 
suffering in vain would be intolerably tragic. 

Why, then is it that the phenomenon of a falling 
birth-rate in Europe has not been generally welcomed? 
If it came to a choice between a rational limitation of 
births, on the one hand, and a degradation‘of the stand- 
ard of life, on the other, could there be any doubt that 
the former would be infinitely preferable? In a world 
where human beings were all alike the answer would 
would be plain; but statesmen will not rejoice in a de- 
clining birth-rate among their own people, if menac- 
ing neighbors continue to multiply; and, within each 
community, men are not pleased to see the class to 
which they belong being crowded out of existence by 
another. The complications introduced by racial, 
national and class distinction have been left out of 
account in the foregoing argument. They must be 
considered in the next two chapters. 


CHAPTER VII 


INTERNATIONAL POPULATION 
PROBLEMS | 


“Why do the nations so furiously rage together; and why 
do the people imagine a vain thing? ”’ 
Psalm ii, 1. 


§ 1. The Influence of Nationality. People nowadays are 
obsessed with national and racial differences. The 
growth of nationalities during the nineteenth century 
was partly a unifying process, by which artificial 
barriers were removed between people of like tradi- 
tions and interests, the area of centralized govern- 
ment enlarged, and internal peace, free trade and un- 
stricted communication secured to great aggregations 
of human beings, like the inhabitants of Germany and 
Italy. For the rest, the nationalist movement was 
concerned with the right of communities which felt 
themselves to be separated from their neighbors in 
vital matters, to govern themselves in their own way’ 
and to be freed from the interference and domination 
of alien states. The tragedy of recent history is the 
transformation of the spirit of nationalism from one 
which seeks unity and resists oppression into a jeal- 
ous exaggeration of differences and a desire to oppress 
others. The idealists who looked forward to the 
break-up of the Austrian Empire as the greatest blessing 
which could come to Europe, have seen the Succession 
States using their freedom to impoverish themselves 
119 


120 POPULATION 


and their neighbors by every device which could impede 
trade or foster bitterness. 

Contempt for this grotesque parody of national 
feeling must not, however, blind us to the fact that 
there are racial and national difference of a very real 
kind. ‘It takes all sorts to make a world,” as coun- 
try-folk say in excusing eccentricities, and the world 
would be a poorer and duller place were it not for the 
diversity of human types each capable of contribut- 
ing some characteristic art or industry or wisdom to 
the common stock. If we ever learn to live together 
in peace and mutual forbearance, settling collectively 
the problems which affect us all and refraining from 
interference with one another in the things which con- 
cern us only within our national groups, we shall real- 
ize the value of that variety. Meanwhile the prob- 
lems of population are multiplied by the number of 
the nations and increase in geometrical progression 
with the jealousies and hostilities between them. 


§ 2. Japan and India. There is the problem of the 
East and the West. How are the necessities and 
prejudices of Western civilization to be reconciled with 
the venerable traditions of Asia? ‘This is largely a 
population problem and one of the toughest. For 
even now the people of Japan are seeking an outlet for 
their surplus offspring and finding the coasts of North 
America and Australia barred against them by West- 
erm armaments. Can we tell them that they must 
limit their numbers while Europe continues to in- 
crease and spread its children over the whole earth? 
That is the attitude which is tacitly adopted by Amer- 
ica and Britain at present; but it is not easily to be 


INTERNATIONAL PROBLEMS 121 


reconciled with international justice. Moreover, the 
claims of the ancient East are now put forward by 
Japan in a language which Europe understands, the 
language of modern armaments. What if the teem- 
ing population of China were equipped with the latest 
weapons of destruction? 

It is impossible in this handbook to discuss these 
immense questions of world politics or to do more 
than indicate their existence. The ‘ White Australia” 
policy, by which a population considerably smaller 
than that of London claims a whole continent and 
excludes Asiatics not only from the districts now in- 
habited, but also from the tropical North where Europ- 
ean settlement has not yet been successful, is a typical, 
if extreme, instance of the attitude which the white 
man has adopted. The implication is that the Asiatic 
is not only different from, but inferior to the European. 
Whether this can be justified scientifically is at least 
doubtful. To reconcile it with a future of peace and 
disarmament is impossible. . 

Another population problem which arises out of . 
the contact between East and West is that of over- 
population in India. British rule has done much to 
- improve the conditions of life in India, but it has also 
cut away the checks to population which formerly 
prevailed there. Apart from the checks of almost con- 
tinuous warfare and destructive famines, the peoples of 
India used to restrict their numbers by various reli- 
gious and social customs akin to those which are found 
among primitive peoples. These customs were ab- 
horrent to European minds and have been almost en- 
tirely stamped out, with the result that the popula- 
tion has increased alarmingly. India suffers from the 


122 POPULATION 


dual evil of a high birth-rate and a high death-rate. 
The average rates per 1000 living for the period 1896-. 
1905 were: birth-rate 38.58; death-rate 34.2; while in 
England the birth-rate was 26.8 and the death-rate 
15.15. Out of every 1000 children born:in India 250 
die before they are a year old; in the United Provinces 
of Agra and Oudh the rate of infant mortality is 352 
per 1000; in England and Wales it is 127.3. 

Mr. P. K. Wattal, of the Indian Finance Depart- 
ment, in an able pamphlet,! sums up the evils from 
- which India is suffering, as follows: 


“As compared with European countries we have: 


(a) A smaller natural increase in spite of a higher 
birth-rate. 

(b) A smaller fecundity in spite of a larger per- 
centage of married persons. . 

(c) An infantile mortality twice or thrice or even 
four times as high. 

(2) A much smaller average expectation of life 
with a steady downward tendency. 

(e) A higher death-rate among young mothers; 
and lastly, 

(f) In common with European countries the 
tendency to increase is greater among the 
lower classes than among the higher.” 


Mr. Wattal does not ask that India’s former checks 
to population should be restored, but that the check 
which Europe has partially adopted, the voluntary 
limitation of families, should be popularized in India 


also. 
1 The Population Problem in India, 1916. 


INTERNATIONAL PROBLEMS 123 


§3. The Big Four. The importance of mere numbers 
in world politics is very great. Everyone will remem- 
_ ber when the Allies assembled at Versailles in 1919 to 
arrange the terms of the Peace Treaties how rapidly 
they were reduced for business purposes from a con- 
ference of thirty-two nations to a Council of Ten and 
from a Council of Ten to a Council of Four—the Big 
Four. No less significant was the way in which the 
Genoa Conference, at which Russia and Germany met 
the other European states for the first time after the 
war on terms of equality, resolved itself into a debate 
between the big countries only. Even the League of 
Nations, in which all the nations have an equal status, 
conducts most of its business in a Council composed 
of the Big Four and four others. The Big Four at 
Versailles were America, Britain, France and Italy; 
at Genoa, they were Russia, Germany, France and 
Britain; and on the Council of the League of Nations 
they are the British Empire, France, Italy and Japan. 
Thus there are seven Great Powers to reckon with in 
the world to-day. Let us briefly examine the position 
of some of them. 


§ 4. The United States. The population of the United 
States in 1820 was about nine and a half millions, in 
1920 it was 105,710,620. Between 1910 and 1920 the 
population increased by 13,738,354. This, as we saw 
in the last chapter, represented a substantial falling 
off in the rate of growth; but it is absolutely a huge 
increase. If numbers continue to multiply at this 
diminished rate, the population will double in about 
eighty years. The significance of these figures is in- 
creased by the fact that American supplies of food and 


124 POPULATION 


raw materials have enabled the population of Europe 
also to expand greatly during the past hundred years, 
so that altogether the growth of numbers due to Amer- 
ican development is gigantic. The United States, 
however, unlike most European countries, can be en- 
tirely self-supporting. Within her vast territories 
she possesses almost every variety of climate and 
natural resources. She has developed within her own 
borders the manufacturing industries which in earlier 
times she stimulated in Europe. The bare existence 
of this great swarm of active beings across the Atlan- 
tic must influence the political psychology of Europe, 
but it is not altogether inevitable that America should 
take a large direct part in the industry or the politics 
of the Old World during the next hundred years. If 
Europe disappeared, America could still live on. 


§5. The British Empire. The remarkable character 
of the British Empire is revealed by a few popula- 
tion figures. In 1821 there were 14,000,000 in Great 
Britain and 6,800,000 in Ireland. In 1921 there were 
42,800,000 in Great Britain, 4,500,000 in Ireland 
5,000,000 in Australia, 1,200,000 in New Zealand, 
319,000,000 in India, 1,500,000 Europeans in South 
Africa and eight or nine millions in Canada.! The posi- 
tion in Great Britain has been discussed in the preced- 
ing chapters; the size of her population is disquieting to 
those who realize how unstable is the foundation upon 
which her welfare has been built, but it will be seen 
from these figures that there is still room in the Dom- 
inions for a great expansion of population. It is prob- 


1There were 7,200,000 in Canada in 1911; the 1921 figures 
are not yet available. 


INTERNATIONAL PROBLEMS 125 


able that in time Canada and Australia will be able 
to support between them something like two hundred 
millions of people. How far this growth may be ex- 
pected to relieve the situation in Great Britain will be 
considered later. 

A curious sidelight on the influence which popula- 
tion changes may have on political issues is cast by 
the above figures respecting Great Britain and Ireland. 
In 1821 the Irish people were half as numerous as the 
people of Great Britain. At that time, therefore, and 
for many years after, an independent and hostile Ireland 
would have been a frightful menace to this country. 
This may partly account for the tradition that the 
very existence of Britain depended upon the subjec- 
tion of Ireland, which survived long after the circum- 
stances had undergone a radical change; until, at last, 
in 1921, when the British outnumbered the Irish by 
- ten to one, complete self-government was conceded to 
them and an apathetic British public wondered vaguely 
why the concession had been so long withheld! 


§ 6. France. France had a population of 29,000,000 
in 1815 at the close of the Napoleonic Wars; in 1870, 
before the cession of Alsace-Lorraine to Germany, she 
had 38,400,000; in 1913, 39,700,000; and in 1921, when 
the restoration of Alsace-Lorraine is set off against 
the fearful losses of the war, 39,200,000 inhabitants. 
The causes of a stationary population in France were 
briefly discussed in the last chapter. Its effect on the 
general social welfare of that country does not seem to 
be bad. M. Levasseur, who has studied the problem 
very thoroughly, implies in his book, La Population 
Francaise, that, while the political and military effects 


126 POPULATION 


of a low birth-rate may be serious, there are compen- 
sating advantages in its influence on material comfort 
and social progress. Unfortunately, the reaction of 
France from seeing her neighbors growing rapidly in 
numbers while her own population remains unchanged, 
appears to be far from pacific. A nervous conscious- 
ness that the biggest battalions must henceforth be- 
long to other nations makes French statesmen pursue 
an external policy designed rather to weaken poten- 
tial enemies than to win the confidence of allies. By 
the year 1914 the population of Germany was nearly 
70 per cent in excess of that of France, and it seems, 
at the time of writing, as though French policy aimed 
at retarding the economic recovery of the German 
people in order to counterbalance the military advan- 
tages which their greater numbers imply. 

It is perhaps unfortunate from an international point 
of view that France is not dependent upon foreign 
trade for the essential means of existence. Her geo- 
graphical position precludes her from the measure of 
isolation which is possible to the United States, but 
the weakness and poverty of her neighbors does not 
react upon her own welfare so directly and acutely as 
it would if she, like Great Britain, were obliged to ex- 
change her manufactures for food and raw materials 
from other countries in order to live at all. 

It is curious that French anxiety respecting the prob- 
lem of population has been until quite recently so com- 
pletely concentrated upon the birth-rate, to the neglect 
of the death-rate. The birth-rate in France between 
1900 and 1909 stood at 20.25, the death-rate at 17.32; 
while in England and Wales, with a birth-rate of 26.8, 
the death-rate was only 15.15; in New Zealand, with 


INTERNATIONAL PROBLEMS 127 


a birth-rate of 26.79 the death-rate was 9.76; and in 
Sweden, with a birth-rate of 26.17, the death-rate was 
14.68. It is obvious that if the French could secure 
a death-rate as low as that of Sweden there would 
be a considerable natural increase in their numbers. 
It is an important fact, however, that a declining 
birth-rate means that the proportion of old to young 
increases and that therefore a higher death-rate is 
inevitable. Let us then look at the rate of infant 
' mortality which cannot be affected by the age-com- 
position of the community. In France the deaths of 
children under one year, per 1000 births, in the period 
1902 to 1911, averaged 1382.4; in England and Wales 
127.3; in New Zealand 64.8; in Sweden 84.4. Here, 
surely, is a source of population which France should 
exploit, before resorting to desperate measures to 
bring more children into the world! It is satisfac- 
tory to learn that vigorous measures are now being 
taken for the protection of both mothers and babies in 
France. 


§7. Germany. The population in 1815 of the va- 
rious states and principalities which are now Germany 
was twenty-one millions; in 1880 it was forty-five 
millions; in 1913 it was sixty-seven millions. In the 
last few years before the war the population was in- 
creasing annually by about 850,000 and emigration 
had practically ceased. From a self-supporting agri- 
cultural country, Germany had become, in a compara- 
tively few years, a highly developed industrial country, 
importing, in 1913, twelve million tons of foodstuffs, 
or about 15 per cent of her total consumption. The 
output of German coal grew from 30,000,000 tons in 


128 POPULATION 


1871 to 190,000,000 tons in 1913, and the industrial 
development of the country corresponded, as Jevons 
would have expected, with this increase. Thirty-nine 
per cent of Germany’s exports in 1913 consisted of 
iron goods, machinery, coal, woolen goods and cotton 
goods. Thirty-five per cent of her imports were raw 
materials and 28 per cent foodstuffs. Germany be- 
fore the war was the very heart of the European in- 
dustrial system. The circulation of trade and credit 
to and from this active center was the life-blood of all 
the neighboring peoples. More goods flowed into 
Russia, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Holland, Swit- 
- gerland, Italy, Austria-Hungary, Roumania and Bul- 
garia from Germany than from any other country, and 
she was the second largest source of supply to Great 
Britain, Belgium: and France. More goods flowed 
into Germany than into any other country from 
Russia, Norway, Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, Italy 
and Austria-Hungary, and she was the second best 
customer of Great Britain, Sweden and Denmark. 
To the countries lying east and south of her frontiers, 
Germany gave not only trade, but capital and organi- 
zation for their development, and they were thus to 
a great extent dependent upon her for the means of 
maintaining life itself. The population of Germany 
and Austria-Hungary together was about equal to 
that of North America; and the whole of this great 
economic system could only be supported by a con- 
stantly increasing activity at the center. ‘The Ger- 
man machine,” it has been well said, ‘‘was like a top 
which to maintain its equilibrium must spin ever faster 
and faster.’’ 4 
1 J. M. Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, p. 11. 


INTERNATIONAL PROBLEMS 129 


$8. Russia. Russia in Europe increased her popu- 
_ lation in the interval between the two great wars al- 
most as rapidly as the United States—from forty- 
eight millions in 1815 to about one hundred and fifty 
millions in 1914. The birth-rate in European Russia 
for the period 1902-11 was stated to be 48.47; the 
death-rate, 31.41; and the rate of infant mortality 
from 1895-1904 was about 260 per 1000 births. 

As long ago as 1882 Sir Robert Giffen, the most saga- 
cious of statisticians, called attention to the difficulties 
which threatened Russia through her enormous rate of 
increase. 


“Until lately,’’ he said, “Russia has been largely in the 
condition of a new country, with vast quantities of land over 
which a growing agricultural population could spread. Now 
the European area is more or less filled up, and unless the 
vast territory of Siberia can be largely utilized for settlement, 
which appears doubtful, the pressure of population on the 
means of subsistence in Russia may soon become very great. 
The soil may be capable of supporting with better agriculture 
a larger population; but this is not the point. The kind of 
agriculture possible in any country is related to the exist- 
ing capacity of the population, or to such improvements in 
that capacity as are in progress, and with the Russian popu- 
lation as it is, there are certainly traces in Russia of an in- 
creasing severity in the struggle for existence, which may at 
any moment become most serious.”’ 1 


We know now how well-founded these forebodings 
were. The war disturbed the precarious equipoise of 
Russian life. Revolution and famine were lying in 
wait for an opportunity to seize their gigantic prey. 


1 Inaugural Address as President of the Statistical Society, re- 
printed in Economic Enquiries and Studies, Vol. II, pp. 18, 14. 


130 POPULATION 


Without the armour of social stability or the strength 
of economic reserves, Russia was soon swallowed up 
by these two monsters; and the country which before 
the war supplied a quarter of the world’s exportable 
wheat surplus, is now begging for bread to save her 
children from dying in millions of sheer starvation. 


§9. War and Population. These, then, are the princi- 
pal characters in the great world drama. Let us now 
turn to the drama itself and consider what part in it 
is played by the Malthusian principle of population; 
how far the struggle for supremacy among the nations 
is indeed a struggle for bread forced upon them by the 
pressure of population on the means of subsistence, 
and how far war may truly be regarded as a check to 
population, and therefore as a dreadful remedy for the 
excessive growth of numbers. 

Sir Walter Raleigh, in a passage quoted above (in 
Chapter I) said:— 


“When any country is overlaid by the multitude which 
live upon it, there is a natural necessity compelling it to dis- 
burden itself and lay the load upon others, by right or wrong, 
for (to omit the danger of pestilence, often visiting them that 
live in throngs) there is no misery that urgeth men so vio- 
lently unto desperate courses and contempt of death as the 
torments and threats of famine. Wherefore, the war that 
is grounded on general remediless necessity bese be termed 
the general and remediless or necessary war.’ 


This thought has been expressed many times since the 
days of Raleigh, in many languages and a great variety 
of forms. General von Bernhardi, for instance, says:— 


“Strong, healthy and flourishing nations increase in num- 
bers. From a given moment they require a continual ex- 


INTERNATIONAL PROBLEMS 131 


pansion of their frontiers, they require new territory for the 
accommodation of their surplus population. Since almost 
every part of the globe is inhabited, new territory must, as a 
rule, be obtained at the cost of its possessors—that is to say, 
by conquest, which thus becomes a law of necessity.” } 


Now, it is fairly obvious that wars of the type sug- 
gested in the phraseology of these passages—wars in 
which a rapidly multiplying people, in imminent dan- 
ger of starvation, burst through their national bound- 
aries and seized the fertile lands of some neighboring 
country—did not occur in the days of Sir Walter Ral- 
eigh, and have not occurred on any great scale since 
his time. History does not recognize, for instance, the 
Napoleonic Wars or the World War of 1914-18 as 
‘‘remediless or necessary wars’’ in the sense in which 
Sir Walter Raleigh used these words. The French were 
not forced at the beginning of the nineteenth century 
to choose between starvation or aggression, nor were 
the Germans a hundred years later. It would be safe 
to say that among the considerations which influence 
the minds of emperors and statesmen when they go 
to war, population problems have hitherto played an 
inconspicuous part. 

Wars, however, like all the events in which great 
masses of men are involved, are brought about by 
many and complex causes, among which conscious 
motives are often less important than hidden influences 
lying beneath the surface of things. To reveal these 
hidden influences is a necessary preliminary step to 
their control, and it is only by understanding the forces 
which are at work among us that we can hope to 


1Germany and the Next War, p. 14. 


132 POPULATION 


substitute human reason for blind impulse in the gov- 
emance of the world. In this matter, therefore, as in 


others that have been touched upon in preceding — 


pages, it is necessary to inquire whether the pressure 
of population may not have had an indirect influence 
of which the chief actors in the drama were scarcely 
conscious. 

If provisions are scarce and employment difficult to 
obtain at home, it is natural that adventurous spirits 
should go abroad in search of better fortune. That 
was how the American colonies came into existence; 
and that is perhaps the main reason why the inhab- 
itants of these small islands have spread themselves 
over the globe. If there had been ample room for an 
expanding population in the United Kingdom, it is 
very probable that the Empire would not have been 
invented. Then the colonial wars with France would 
not have taken place; a later generation would have 
had no reason to fear the power of Russia; the Ameri- 
can and Boer wars would have been impossible, and 
the whole course of European history would have been 
different. Thus it may be seen at a glance how closely 
population questions are involved in the underlying 
causes of national and racial conflicts. But this, it must 
be admitted, is little more than saying that if human 
bemgs did not come into contact with one another 
they could not fight! The vital question is whether 
conflicts actually tend to arise through the compe- 
tition of nations for the limited subsistence yielded 
by the earth to human efforts. Here, as we have seen, 
there are two opposing tendencies at work. On the 
one hand, there is the tendency for the total amount 
of human subsistence to be greatly increased by co- 


INTERNATIONAL PROBLEMS 133 


operation between man and man, by the division of 
_ labor and the application of science to nature. On the 
other hand, the Law of Diminishing Returns tends 
to develop a constantly increasing competition between 
nations for sources of food and raw materials and for 
markets in which to sell the manufactures which pay 
for the food. Unfortunately, the latter tendency ex- 
ercises a greater influence on the conduct of diplo- 
macy than the former. We have only to glance through 
the list of subjects which occupied statesmen during 
the ten years before the war—Morocco, Tripoli, the 
Bagdad Railway, the Congo, Mexico, China—to see 
that this is true. The scramble for first place in the 
exploitation of backward races and undeveloped ter- 
ritories, for markets and for sources of raw materials 
is one of the most potent causes of international fric- 
tion. Are we not then forced to the conclusion that 
the fundamental problem of human life—the pressure 
of population on the means of subsistence—plays a 
considerable part in creating the atmosphere in which 
wars arise? The fact that the real nature of these 
issues is little recognized, and still less discussed, by 
diplomats is itself a source of danger. In many cases 
a solution tolerable to all parties. to the dispute could 
be found: free access to raw materials or markets—the 
Open Door in Morocco, for instance—would be a small 
price to pay for co-operation instead of conflict; but 
the underlying issue is seldom brought to light, and 
some artificial cause of quarrel, like the despatch of 
a gunboat to an obscure harbor, proves more danger- 
ous than the tangible interests would be if they were 
squarely faced. Not, indeed, that there is any way 
by which the nations can go on multiplying without 


134 POPULATION 


creating a scarcity in the products of the soil. It is 
not suggested that an easy solution of the subsistence 
problem awaits the statesman who is clear-sighted 
enough to face it. It is a hard nut to crack. But it 
is not made any easier by war; on the contrary, it is 
rendered more difficult. If war had been avoided in 
1914, the inhabitants of Europe would have been 
living to-day on a relatively high standard and receiv- 
ing generous supplies of food and raw materials from 
every quarter of the globe. It is the war itself which ~ 
has made the population problem a burning question. 


§ 10. War and Subsistence. Malthus included war in 
his list of checks to population. It is natural that he 
should do so, for it is destructive of human life, both 
directly and indirectly, through the famine and dis- 
ease which it brings in its train. As a means of re- 
ducing population relatively to the food supply, how- 
ever, war is a disastrous failure. The Thirty Years 
War, as we saw in Chapter I, was immensely destruc- 
tive of human life; but at the same time it was de- 
structive of human food and the means of producing 
food to such an extent that it probably lowered the 
standard of life of the people who survived. “Bavaria, | 
Franconia and Swabia,’’ we read, “‘were desolated by 
famine and disease, while the rest of Germany and 
Austria fared little better. ... Cattle and sheep di- 
minished to an extraordinary extent, and many once 
fertile districts became forests inhabited by wolves 
and other savage beasts.” 

One may reasonably doubt whether the proportion 
of the means of subsistence to population was increased 
by this process. 


INTERNATIONAL PROBLEMS 135 


In modern war the same difficulty arises. The de- 
~ struction of human life is accompanied by a greater 
diminution of the means of subsistence through a dis- 
location of production and transport, and a deteriora- 
tion of the soil through neglect; and, in some cases, 
the food supply takes longer than the population to 
recover its former magnitude. Let us look at the grim 
balance-sheet of the great war by which Europe is still 
(four years after the armistice) half paralyzed. France, 
the country which, with her stationary population, 
must be the slowest to recover her numerical strength, 
lost more than two million people between 1914 and 
1921. This figure is exclusive of the inhabitants of 
the restored provinces of Alsace-Lorraine, but it in- 
eludes civilian deaths, which were swollen by an in- 
creased rate of mortality attributable to war condi- 
tions, including the influenza epidemic of 1918. With 
the return of peace, the number of marriages and 
births rapidly increased and the number of deaths 
decreased. In 1920 there were twice as many mar- 
riages as there were in 1913. The excess of births over 
deaths, excluding those in Alsace-Lorraine, was 143,000 
in 1920 and 100,000 in 1921, as against an average from 
1904 to 1913 of 33,500. The increase in 1920 has been 
paralleled only in the years immediately after the 
Franco-Prussian war. Apart, then, from the restored 
provinces, it will take France about seventeen years 
to regain her 1913 population, if the natural imcrease 
remains at the level of the last two years; or thirty to 
forty years if the rate falls to the pre-war level. Alsace- 
Lorraine contains about 1,700,000, and if these are in- 
cluded the total population of France is already within 
half a million of its former size. 


136 POPULATION 


When one thinks of the shattering experiences through 
which the German people have passed since July, 1914, 
the vital statistics of Germany are astounding. About 
1,700,000 Germans were killed in the war. The loss 
due to the reduction of the birth-rate in the war years 
is estimated at 3,300,000; and the increased mortality 
among the civilian population at 500,000. The sur- 
rendered territory, including Upper Silesia, contained 
six and a half millions of inhabitants. Yet the total 
decrease in the population of Germany between 1913 
and 1921 was only four and a half millions! In other 
words, the population of post-war Germany has 2n- 
creased since 1913 by two millions! This extraordi- 
nary fact is partly accounted for by an influx of ref- 
ugees—Germans expelled from abroad and others— 
the number of whom cannot be accurately determined, 
but is estimated at about a million. For the rest, a 
post-war boom in marriages and births and a low mor- 
tality (especially infant mortality, which has actually 
been less since the war than in 1913) must be held 
responsible. 

The population of Russia has, of course, been greatly 
diminished by the chaos into which that country has 
been flung since the war began. As, however, it is 
painfully evident that Russia is suffering more from 
overpopulation in 1922 than she was in 1918, it is un- 
necessary to go into the statistics. The same remark 
applies in a lesser degree to Austria. In Great Britain, 
Belgium and Italy the population in 1920 was equal 
to, or greater than, that of 1913. 

Turning now to the other side of our balance-sheet, 
to the effect of the war on the means of subsistence, 
what do we find? That everywhere among the bellig- 


INTERNATIONAL PROBLEMS 137 


erents productivity has decreased in a much greater 
degree than population. In 1919, Mr. Hoover, the 
American Food Controller and Director-General of 
Relief in Europe, estimated that the population of 
Europe was at least one hundred millions greater than 
could be supported without imports, and warned the 
world that unless productivity could be rapidly in- 
creased there could be nothing but “political, moral 
and economic chaos, finally interpreting itself in loss 
of life hitherto undreamed of.’?! Three good harvests 
and the extraordinary recuperative power of human 
beings have gone a long way towards falsifying that 
estimate. Nevertheless, the German people still have 
to subsist on 55 per cent of the supply of the most 
necessary articles of diet which was available per head 
before the war. The standard of living has been low- 
ered 45 per cent. Even so, Germany has now to im- 
port 17.7 per cent of the most necessary foodstuffs, 
as against 5 per cent in 1913. In order to give back 
to it its pre-war productivity, the soil of Germany must 
have restored to it the nitrates and phosphates taken 
from it during the war; but the nitrate factories can- 
not work without the coal and coke which are sent 
abroad under the terms of the Peace Treaty, and phos- 
phates cannot be imported in sufficient quantities un- 
til purchasing power increases. 

It is unnecessary to pursue this inquiry into the 
effect of the war upon the means of subsistence in Ger- 
many, or to describe the position in the other belliger- 
ent countries. The poverty and disorganization every- 
where are only too conspicuous. There can be no 
doubt whatever that the loss of population in Europe 

1 Times, August 13, 1919. 


138 POPULATION 


through the war is far exceeded by the diminution of 
the means of subsistence, and that there will be many 
more people than there were in 19138 before the recovery 
of pre-war productivity has been accomplished. Like 
the giant in the fairy story, a modern nation grows 
new heads faster than the avenger can cut them off. 

It would seem, then, that modern war is not a check 
to population in the Malthusian sense at all. An in- 
fluence which decreases the number of human beings 
to a smaller extent than it diminishes the yield of hu- 
man food and the other necessaries of life does not 
come within that category. 

Far from being a remedy for over-population, war 
is, indeed, one of the most powerful influences tending 
to keep the standard of life down to the subsistence 
level. On the one hand, it interrupts the process of 
world-wide co-operation in the exploitation of nature 
without which the earth could not maintain a tenth 
of its present population. On the other hand, it creates 
a special. and urgent need for more and more human 
beings in each nation in order to supply the man-power 
which makes for victory. In the vicious circle thus 
created the teazhing of Malthus is only too clearly 
vindicated. The greater the pressure of population 
upon the world’s food supply the more likelihood there 
is that points of friction will arise between the nations 
in potential food-producing areas; and the instinctive 
nationalist reaction to this half-formulated fear, that 
a redundant population at home will suffer through 
the competition of other nations for ‘‘places in the 
sun’’ and new sources of food and raw material, is not 
to co-operate more fully with those other nations so 
as to produce the maximum supply of the desired com- 


INTERNATIONAL PROBLEMS 139 


modities as rapidly as possible, but rather to seek ex- 
clusive privileges in undeveloped countries, to claim 
preferential treatment from colonies, and to erect pro- 
tective tariff barriers and other obstacles to the free 
exchange of goods and services throughout the world. 
In this way the consciousness of having an excessive 
population tends to make a nation adopt a restrictive 
trade policy and an aggressive foreign policy, though 
the former may lower the standard of life in its over- 
crowded cities, while the latter will lead to a demand 
for a still greater population to serve the purposes of 
war. 

It is necessary to repeat that the difficulty does not 
arise exclusively from racial and international hostil- 
ities. To suggest that there would be plenty of food 
and raw materials to maintain all the nations in com- 
fort no matter how rapidly their numbers increased, 
if only they would live together in peaceful co-opera- 
tion, would be as unwarrantable as the easy optimism 
of anti-Malthusians in the nineteenth century. The 
population problem can only be solved by a decline 
in the world’s birth-rate, and if that solution is not 
attained, then the checks which Malthus enumerated 
will continue from time to time to reduce excessive 
numbers through the instrumentality of vice and mis- 
ery. 

National hostilities, however, interpose a _ barrier 
between mankind and the rational consideration of 
the matter, and lead to national policies which aggra- 
vate the evils and increase the dangers by which the 
laws of nature have surrounded us. , The first step 
towards the co-ordination of the number of human 
beings with the available food supply will not be taken 


140 POPULATION 


until we have ceased to regard a relative advantage 
over rival nations as more important than the well- 
being of humanity as a whole. 


§ 11. Emigration. That the present trend of opinion 
is away from a world policy in regard to population 
problems, and tending rather to harden in the direc- 
tion of exclusive nationalism, is illustrated by the new 
attitude towards emigration and immigration which 
has been adopted since the war. 
_ Hitherto, the migration of the surplus population 
of the Old World to seek a livelihood by developing the 
resources of new countries has, generally speaking, 
been regarded as beneficial to all concerned. Besides 
relieving one labor market and supplying another, the 
process was held to assist production by transferring 
resources from places where their productive power 
was less to places where it was greater, thus adding to 
the joint wealth of the old and new countries. That 
acute distress in Ireland, for instance, was relieved by 
continuous emigration on a very large scale in propor- 
tion to her population is generally accepted; and 
that the development of the United States has been 
quickened by streams of immigrants from Europe is 
undeniable. 

A great deal depends upon the age and character of 
the emigrants. It is clearly impracticable to transfer 
a representative section of the community to the other 
side of the world. In practice it must be the young 
men and women who go abroad, with just a sprinkling 
of children, and it is difficult enough to avoid a great 
excess of male over female emigrants. One result of 
emigration must, therefore, be that the proportion of 


INTERNATIONAL PROBLEMS 141 


workers to non-workers (the young and the old) remain- 
ing behind will be diminished, and a serious additional 
burden will be thrown upon the former. A more spec- 
ulative question is whether the birth-rate among the 
home population will not rise. During the Middle 
Ages, when the principal check to population was post- 
ponement of marriage, there is reason to believe that 
any unusual mortality due to war or pestilence was 
followed by a sharp rise in the birth-rate, so that the 
population rapidly recovered its former magnitude. 
Now, postponement of marriage is still to some ex- 
tent operative as a check to population, and it is at 
least possible that the emigration of a large number 
of young adults would thus stimulate the fertility of 
those who remained behind. 

Emigration, in fact, is an appropriate remedy for a 
temporary surplus of labor in industry such as may 
so easily arise in the interval before population can 
adjust itself to a change in conditions. It is not by 
any means a complete remedy for a recurring annual 
excess of births over deaths in an overcrowded country. 
_ The clear-cut division of labor between Europe and 
America, which characterized the growth of wealth and 
commerce in the ’seventies, made it very obvious that 
emigration must benefit both continents. The indus- 
trial development of Europe was assisted by the growth _ 
of new markets for manufactured articles abroad, while 
the cost of living was kept down by a ever-increasing 
supply of food and raw materials grown by the emi- 
grants. America, on the other hand, profited by the 
supply of laborers from Europe, and by the implements, 
capital goods and transport facilities which accom- 
panied them. It was an idealarrangement. During the 


142 POPULATION 


last thirty years, however, American opinion has been 
hardening against the unrestricted admission of im- 
migrants from Europe. The conditions have changed. 
America is filing up; and economic objections to the 
free admission of cheap labor are reinforced by polit- 
ical considerations with regard to the racial composi- 
tion of the population. Since 1917 a literacy test has 
been imposed upon immigrants to the United States, 
with the object of checking the flow of people from 
Southern and Eastern Europe without interfering un- 
duly with those from Western Europe. This measure, 
however, was considered altogether imadequate to 
protect America against the invasion of hordes of ref- 
ugees expected after the war; and in 1921 a law was 
passed enacting that the number of aliens of any na- 
tionality who may be admitted into the United States 
in any fiscal year shall be limited to 3 per cent of the 
number of foreign-born persons of such nationality 
resident in the United States, as shown by the census 
of 1910. 

Meanwhile a sudden change has taken place in the~ 
attitude of European states towards the emigration 
of their citizens. The war-time valuation of ‘“man- 
power” has been applied to the affairs of peace. The 
value of each individual to the State as a potential 
soldier, or an economic asset, is now carefully weighed 
before he is allowed to leave the country, and even 
when emigration is permitted, the emigrant is still 
subject to elaborate regulations designed to preserve 
some part of his economic value for his country of 
origin. Before the war a few simple international 
conventions governed the movements of population; 
for the rest, the countries of destination selected and 


INTERNATIONAL PROBLEMS 143 


controlled the immigrants. Now we have rival pol- 
icies developing between the emigration and immigra- 
tion countries, and some compromise must be reached 
if freedom of movement is not to disappear from the 
earth. 

Great Britain is happily relieved from anxiety re- 
garding this new phrase of exclusive nationalism by 
the existence of the Dominions overseas. There is 
plenty of room within the Empire for British emigrants 
for many years to come. “Why, then,” it is sometimes 
asked, “‘should we feel any uneasiness about the con- 
tinued growth of population at home? We may be 
exhausting our reserves of coal and losing markets for 
our manufactures, but is there not plenty of scope 
for our surplus labor in the Dominions?” It is nec- 
essary to examine this suggestion in some detail. 

The reader may remember that early in this chapter 
it was suggested that Australia and Canada together 
would eventually be able to support some two hundred 
millions, and an undertaking was given to examine later — 
how far this room for expansion might be expected to 
relieve the situation in Great Britain. This, then, is 
the place in which to carry out that inquiry. 

During the last ten years the population of England 
and Wales, if there had been no deaths due to war, 
would have increased by about 2,500,000. The emigra- 
tion during the same period has been about 630,000, 
the highest figure in any decade since 1871. In order 
to keep the population of this country constant, there- 
fore, an emigration of about 250,000 persons each year, 
or five times the present rate, would be necessary. Let 
us assume that, with the aid of the British and Do- 
minion Governments, this number could be carried over- 


144 POPULATION 


seas and given employment in Canada and Australia. 
What would be the effect on conditions in England? 

It is impossible to foresee whether this emigration 
would increase or decrease the birth-rate in the old 
country. At first sight it would seem probable that 
the withdrawal of a number of men and women at an 
age for parenthood would diminish the average fertil- 
ity; but we have seen how the birth-rate in all coun- 
tries rises after a war, and it must be remembered that 
emigration is proposed as a means of benefiting the 
home population. Ha hypothest, therefore, the imme-. 
diate effect should be to improve the conditions of 
labor, to offer, if not better wages, at least more con- 
tinuous employment to those who remain. What 
guarantee is there that they would not take out this 
improvement in earlier marriage and a higher birth- 
rate? 

The indirect effect upon the home population of a 
great increase in the number of people in Canada and 
Australia is also difficult to determine. The world is 
now an economic unit. An increase in the supply of 
capital and labor in a far country must, therefore, 
have a great influence on the welfare of the people 
here. We have seen already how the industrial de- 
velopment of the United States has reacted upon the 
life of Europe. 

Now if our emigrants had remained at home a large 
proportion of them would necessarily have been em- 
ployed in manufacturing industries. Must we assume 
that they will be so employed in the Dominions? The 
effect of their labor upon conditions in England de- 
pends very largely upon the answer to that question. 
If they increase the supply of food and raw materials 


INTERNATIONAL PROBLEMS 145 


in Australia and Canada they will benefit England by 

promoting the exchange of those things which she needs 
for the manufactures’she produces. If, on the other 
hand, they develop,’ the manufacturing industries of 
the New World, it might have been better for their 
countrymen if they had stayed at home. Those who 
are not themselves\ engaged in manufacturing must, 
indeed, derive some benefit from the opening up of a 
new source of supply. which in the long run will help 
to cheapen the articles.produced. From the point of 
view of England as a whole, however, this advantage 
is to some extent counterbalanced by the dependence 
of a large part of the community upon the production 
of articles which would have to meet intensified com- 
petition in the markets of the world and especially in 
the Dominions themselves. Our 250,000 workers 
would overstock the labor market in this country, but, 
at the best, some advantage might be obtained from 
increasing returns in industry if they remained here, 
and, at the worst, they would share with their fellow- 
workers the evils of over-population. If they emigrated 
and enlisted in the same industries overseas, their 
competition would be just as keenly felt at home, it 
could not bring with it any compensating economies 
in production, and it might be more severe because it 
would be based upon the untapped resources of new 
lands. : 

The evidence as to whether the emigrants would, in 
fact, tend to go on the land or into industry is con- 
flicting. On the one hand, the Dominion Governments 
prefer to put new-comers into farming; the trade 

‘unions in the Dominions do not welcome a great acces- 
sion to their numbers; and the type of man who has 


146 POPULATION | 


hitherto left Great Britain to seek his fortune in the 
New World takes kindly to an open-air life.. On the 
other hand, manufacturing industries being fostered 
by protection in Australia and Canada, the farmer is 
discouraged by taxation for their benefit; and a great 
increase in emigration, such as we are considering, 
could not be confined to the type of man who ordinarily 
chooses to rough it abroad, but must include a large 
proportion of industrial workers, for whom, indeed, 
it is designed. There can be no certainty as to what 
would happen; but one may hazard a guess that, even 
if all the emigrants were in the first place planted upon 
the land, a very large proportion of them would even- 
tually drift into the towns. 

It would seem, then, on examination, that emigra- 
‘tion is by no means a perfect remedy for over-pop- 
ulation. It involves the withdrawal of a number of 
people from the community at a time of life when 
they are most active, leaving the young and the old to 
be provided for by others. It throws upon a country 
which is already feeling the strain of population the 
burden of breeding up human beings to the produc- 
tive age and then exporting them free of charge. It 
may give rise to an increasing birth-rate at home. And 
it may stimulate industries overseas in competition 
with the home country and thus increase the very 
evil which it is designed to cure. 


§ 12. The Danger to Civilization. In this brief survey 
of international population problems we have seen 
how human co-operation and the division of labor 
have made it possible for vast numbers of people to 
come into existence, and to be maintained at a higher 


INTERNATIONAL PROBLEMS 147 


standard of life than the earth has ever yielded before. 
We have also seen how national antagonisms intensify 
the difficulties which man must overcome in winning 
his subsistence from the earth. The present tendency 
appears to be away from co-operation and towards a 
keener sense of national differences. But that road 
leads inevitably to a bitter struggle upon an over- 
populated planet for the bare necessities of life. Is 
that to be the end of modern civilization, or will human 
reason overcome blind impulse in time to avert the 
catastrophe? That the twentieth century should be 
faced by this question is a striking proof of the wis- 
dom of Malthus in grasping the issue one hundred and 
twenty years ago. Let us avoid the shallow optimism 
of his opponents, for which, indeed, we have less ex- 
cuse than they had, and face the problem squarely. 


CHAPTER VIII 
THE QUALITY OF POPULATION 


‘A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit; neither can a 
corrupt tree bring forth good fruit.” 
Matthew vii, 18. 


§1. Introductory. The first six chapters of this hand- 
book were devoted to the quantitative problems of pop- 
ulation; the influence of increasing numbers of human 
beings on the supply of human food—and, in those 
chapters, the differences between one human being 
and another were almost entirely ignored. In the 
last chapter an attempt was made to outline the broad- 
est of qualitative population problems; to indicate the 
complications that arise through differences in race 
and nationality. Now it is necessary to refer to ques- 
tions of quality within each community and to consider | 
the bearing of the relative numbers of one sex to the 
other, and of one social class to another, upon popula- 
tion problems as a whole. 


§ 2. Why there are more Women than Men. Before the 
war there were nearly eight million more females than 
males in Europe, and about 1,300,000 more females 
than males in Great Britain. In 1921 the females ex- 
ceeded the males in this country by about 1,900,000, 
and it is probable that the disproportion in Europe as 
a whole has increased in a like ratio. The first fact to 
notice in seeking the cause of this disparity is that in 
148 


THE QUALITY OF POPULATION 149 


all Western communities more boys than girls are born; 
_ the excess of male births ranging from twenty to sixty 
per thousand. The mortality amongst boys, espe- 
cially in the first year of life, is greater than that of 
_girls, and the numbers become equal in most coun- 
tries between the ages of fifteen and twenty. Then 
it appears that the dangers to which men are specially 
subject in middle age, industrial accidents, war and 
exposure to weather, are more deadly than those 
encountered by women, of which the chief is child- 
birth, and the women begin to predominate in those 
years. In old age ‘the weaker sex’’ displays more 
vitality than the other, and increases its lead. Emi- 
gration, too, must play a considerable part in the dis- 
parity between the sexes in Europe, for on the Ameri- 
can continent as a whole the balance is tilted the other 
way, the men exceeding the women by over four mil- 
lions, while in Australia also there is a shortage of 
women. 

It is generally agreed that the reaction upon social 
life of this disproportion between the sexes on both 
sides of the Atlantic is undesirable; especially so per- 
haps in Europe where the status of women is ad- 
versely affected by the existence of a “surplus.’”? The 
most obvious remedy is the promotion of a larger em- 
igration of women from the Old World to the New. 
An attempt is being made in this direction; but the 
difficulties are formidable, since the larger towns in 
America and the British Dominions already have a 
fair proportion of women, and the less developed dis- 
tricts are not so suitable for women to live in. More- 
over, the excess of women in Europe is at least double 
the excess of men in the other countries with white 


150 POPULATION 


communities, so emigration could at best only solve 
half the problem. The root of the trouble lies in the 
high rate of mortality among boy-babies and it is 
a disquieting fact that in this country the difference 
between the sexes in this respect has increased. Accord- 
ing to Dr. Saleeby, 14 per cent more boys than girls 
now die in infancy, and twenty or thirty years ago the 
difference used to be only 6 per cent. No explana- 
tion of this fact has been offered by the authorities on 
the subject. We have seen, however, that infant mor- 
tality as a whole is declining, and as boys are more 
difficult to rear than girls, it is not perhaps surpris- 
ing that the latter should be the first to benefit from 
improved conditions of life. It is to be hoped that as 
the care of infants further develops, the boys, too, will 
be saved. It seems probable also that as women are 
tending more and more to participate in the occupa- 
tions that were formerly kept exclusively for men, the 
risks of middle age will fall more evenly upon the sexes 
and thus the disparity will be reduced. 


§ 3. The Fertility of Different Classes. The reader may 
remember that in discussing the causes of the decline 
of the birth-rate we noted, incidentally, in Chapter — 
VI, that this decline has not been uniformly distributed 
over all sections of the community, but has been more 
marked in the more prosperous classes. We must now 
consider that lack of uniformity in some detail, for it 
has an important bearing upon the question of the 
quality of our population. 

The births in England and Wales in 1911, per 1000 


1 Bvidence before the National Birth-rate Commission. (The 
Declining Birth-raie, p. 414.) 


THE QUALITY OF POPULATION 151 


married men under fifty-five years of age, classified 
~ according to the occupation of the father, were as 
follows: 


1. Upper and Middle Class . . . 119 
2. Intermediate. ; A : We Wdent LO’ 
3. Skilled Workman. . Bh Malan LEON Loe 
4, Intermediate. ; . 158 
5. Unskilled Workmen . : LAMals 


The rate of infant mortality in these groups, fol- 
lowing the same order, was 76.4, 106.4, 112.7, 121.5, 
152.5. The proportion of infants born and surviving 
the first year of life in the different classes was there- 
fore: Class 1, 110; Class 2, 118; Class 3, 186; Class 4, 
139; Class 5, 181. 

From these figures it is evident that the children 
born at the present time in this country are unevenly 
distributed among the classes; the wealthiest people 
having as a rule the fewest children, and the size of 
families increasing, broadly speaking, as the incomes 
decrease, so that unskilled laborers have the most chil- 
dren. It is evident also that infant mortality tends to 
reduce this disparity, but does not eliminate it. There 
is no evidence available as to the relative size of fami- 
lies later in life. 

Now the figures given above do not show whether 
the differences in the fertility of various classes have 
been increased by the fall in the birth-rate; they only 
show that there are differences at the present time. 
Mr. Udney Yule, however, has compiled a Table in 
which he has arranged certain London districts in the 
order of the number of female domestic servants em- 


152 POPULATION 


ployed, taking this as a measure of the social stand- 
ing of a district, so that the fertilities of upper and 
lower-class districts can be compared. The results 
obtained by this method of comparison are interest- 
ing. In 1871 the differences between the districts were 
by. no means regular or striking. The fertilities of 
Hampstead, Kensington and Paddington, for example, 
exceeded those of Southwark and Shoreditch, although — 
the former are at the top of the social scale and the 
latter at the bottom. In 1901 the position was very 
different. The districts at the top of the list then 
showed a very low fertility, 23 per cent below that 
of 1871, while those at the bottom remained as pro- 
lific as they had been thirty years before. From 1901 
to 1911, however, the top districts decreased their 
fertility by an average of 3 per cent, while the bottom 
districts dropped theirs by about 5 per cent. The 
figures for individual districts are so irregular that 
Mr. Yule does not lay stress on the last result. “It 
seems probable enough,’ he says, ‘“‘that the more 
rapid decrease may have spread from the upper strata 
downwards, and in the decade 1901-1911 have begun 
to affect even such districts as Poplar, Bermondsey 
and Bethnal Green, but more evidence is necessary 
before this can be accepted as a demonstrated conclu- 
sion.” ! 

The general deduction, that the difference between 
the fertility of different classes is very much greater 
now than it was fifty years ago is confirmed by in- 
dependent statistical inquiries undertaken by Drs. 
Heron and Stevenson and others, and may be taken 
as an established fact. 


The Fall of the Birth-rate, p. 27. 


THE QUALITY OF POPULATION 153 


§ 4. A Cause of the High Birth-rate among the Poor. 
It is difficult to regard this distribution of children as 
satisfactory. Bernard Shaw’s dictum on the distribu- 
tion of wealth: ‘‘Dinners without appetites at one 
end of the town, and appetites without dinners at the 
other end,”’ becomes still more disquieting when we 
add: ‘‘Houses and comfort without children at one 
end of the town, and children without houses and 
comfort at the other end.” Clearly birth control has 
begun to exercise an influence on numbers at the wrong 
end of the social scale. Probably this was inevitable; 
certainly it was to be expected, if account be taken of 
the conspiracy, in which practically the whole of the 
educated classes have joined until recently, to keep 
working men and women in ignorance both of their 
duty not to bring children into the world unless they 
have a reasonable expectation of being able to provide 
for them, and of the means by which this duty can be 
fulfilled. 

John Stuart Mill, usually the calmest of philosophers, 
was moved to write indignantly on this subject, and 
much of his rebuke is, unhappily, applicable to the 
present generation. 


“Poverty,” he wrote, “like most social evils, exists because 
men follow their brute instincts without due consideration. 
But society is possible, precisely because man is not necessa- 
rily a brute. Civilization in every one of its aspects is a strug- 
gle against the animal instincts. Over some, even of the 
strongest of them, it has shown itself capable of acquiring 
abundant control... . If it has not brought the instinct of 
population under as much restraint as is needful, we must re- 
member that it has never seriously tried. What efforts it has 
made have mostly been in the contrary direction. Religion, 


154 POPULATION 


morality and statesmanship have vied with one another in 
incitements to marriage, and to the multiplication of the 
species, so it be but in. wedlock. Religion has not even yet 
discontinued its encouragements. ... The rich, provided 
the consequences do not touch themselves, think it impugns 
the wisdom of Providence to suppose that misery can result 
from the operation of a natural propensity: the poor think 
that ‘God never sends mouths but He sends meat.’ No one 
would guess from the language of either that man had any 
voice or choice in the matter.” ? 


To this outburst, Mull added a fierce footnote: 


“Little improvement can be expected in morality until 
the producing of large families is regarded with the same 
feelings as drunkenness or any other physical excess. But 
while the aristocracy and clergy are foremost to set the ex- 
ample of this kind of incontinence, what can be expected 
from the poor?’’2 


§ 5. Eugenic Considerations. It must be admitted 
that the aristocracy now set a different example, and 
even the clergy (of the Church of England at any 
rate), contrary to the popular impression, have only 
seventy-two children for every hundred that are born 
in average families. Precept, however, has not as 
yet followed example to any great extent, and much © 
of Mill’s indictment is still relevant. Some authori- 
ties think, indeed, that our present state is worse 
than that of which Mill complained, because, they 
say, we are breeding fastest from the worse stocks, 
and the physical and mental deterioration of the race 
must inevitably result. Thus, Dean Inge, who man- 
ages to combine the keenest enjoyment of controversy 


1 Political Economy, Book II, Chap. XIII, § 1. 
2 Ibid. (Note.) 


THE QUALITY OF POPULATION 155 


with pessimistic views on the future prospects of man- 
_ kind, says that: 


“Natural selection, which in uncivilized societies weeds 
out all nature’s failures, has almost ceased to act. A dwarf 
can mind a machine, a cripple can keep accounts. The gen- 
eral handiness and adaptibility which is second nature to a 
savage is useless in an age of specialization. ... We are 
thus faced with a progressive deterioration of our stock, due 
to the suspension of natural selection and the entire absence 
of anything like rational selection.’’ 4 


In another place the Dean writes: 


“Hither rational selection must take the place of the nat- 
ural selection which the modern State will not allow to act, 
or we shall deteriorate as surely as a miscellaneous crowd of 
dogs which was allowed to rear puppies from promiscuous 
matings.” 2 


It is easy to pick holes in the Dean’s argument; to 
point out, for instance, that even in uncivilized soci- 
eties dwarfs may be successful witch-doctors, and thus 
survive and become powerful; that the natural selec- 
tion which prefers muscles to brains and low cunning 
to artistic genius is not necessarily desirable, and that 
many dog-lovers consider mongrels to be more in- 
telligent, hardy and lively than pedigree animals. The 
advocate of eugenics cannot, however, be dismissed 
with a few debating points. The purely economic 
objection to the present distribution of children can 
be met to some extent by the provision of free educa- 
tion, by housing acts, by the feeding and medical su-- 
pervision of children at school, by infant welfare centers, 


1 Outspoken Essays, 2d series, pp. 265-266. ? Ibid., p. 257. 


156 POPULATION 


and so on. But if it is true that these measures tend 
to perpetuate the predominance of the worst stocks 
in the production of future generations, then they are 
positively harmful instead of being beneficial. The 
matter is, therefore, one of serious practical impor- 
tance. 

Is there really any reason to suppose that the poor 
are physically and mentally inferior to the rich, or 
even that unskilled laborers are fundamentally in- 
ferior, as a class, to artisans? Those who know the 
poor best are often ready to maintain the contrary 
view, and to-assert that only a superiority over the 
other classes in stamina and courage could enable them 
to face the risks and hardships of their way of life. 
Thus, Stephen Reynolds, who lived for some years in 
the house of a Devonshire fisherman, wrote that: 


‘the more intimately one lives among the poor the more one 
admires their amazing talent for happiness in spite of priva- 
tion, and their magnificent courage in the face of uncertainty; 
and the more also one sees that these qualities have been 
called into being, or kept alive, by uncertainty and thriftless- 
ness. ... The man matters more than his circumstances. 
The poor man’s Courage to Live is his most valuable distinc- 
tive quality. Most of his finest virtues spring therefrom. 
... The poor and the middle class are different in kind 
as well as in degree. (More different perhaps than the poor 
and the aristocrat.) Their civilizations are not two stages of 
the same civilization, but two civilizations, two traditions, 
which have grown up concurrently, though not of course 
-without considerable intermingling. ... The civilization 
of the poor may be more backward materially, but it con- 
tains the nucleus of a finer civilization than that of the mid- 
dle class.” 1 


1A Poor Man’s House, pp. 262, 267, 270. 


THE QUALITY OF POPULATION 157 


The eugenist, while not necessarily questioning 
the accuracy of Mr. Reynolds’s conclusions with re- 
gard to Devonshire fishermen, would say that they 
are inapplicable to the poor in large towns and indus- 
trial districts. It is noteworthy, however, that Miss 
M. Loane, after long observation of the poor of Lon- 
don, among whom she worked as a nurse, arrived in- 
dependently at much the same opinion.! 

Even those who entirely accept the view that the 
peasant class is likely to be at least as sound from the 
racial standpoint as any other class, must, however, 
admit that there are disquieting influences at work. 
If the classes remained in watertight compartments, 
and the children were evenly distributed within each 
class, all might be well for the future of the race. Un- 
fortunately, from the eugenic point of view, there is 
a tendency for the failures of one class to fall into the 
next; a converse tendency for the most capable mem- 
bers of each class to climb up the social ladder; and, 
worst of all, a tendency for the least satisfactory mem- 
bers of each class to have the largest number of children. 

The most serious instance of the tendency last men- 
tioned is to be found in the reproductive power of the 
feeble-minded. It appears to be an established fact 
that feeble-mindedness is a hereditary defect. It fol- 
lows the same rules as other hereditary qualities in 
plants and animals which have been discovered through 
the science of genetics. Feeble-mindedness is a so- 
called recessive characteristic and reproduces itself 
in accordance with certain clearly defined rules, through 
the marriage of two persons who both come from de- 


1See From their Point of View, The Next Street but One, and 
other books by M. Loane. 


158 POPULATION 


fective stock. It cannot be bred out of a family in 
which it has established itself, but it could be elimin- 
ated by the segregation of all feeble-minded persons. 
Unfortunately, the birth-rate of the feeble-minded is 
50 per cent higher than that of normal people; and as 
these poor creatures have, in most cases, to be main- 
tained by the State, it seems most reasonable for the 
Eugenics Education Society to recommend their com- 
pulsory segregation. That measure is, indeed, called 
for as a protection for the feeble-minded themselves, 
apart from the interests of the community in which 
they live. 


§ 6. Present Limitations of Eugenics. Responsible stu- 
dents of genetics do not, as a rule, advocate any im- 
mediate action by the community beyond that indica- 
ted in the last paragraph. Their science is still in its 
infancy, and there are formidable difficulties to over- 
come before positive action can be contemplated. As 
an American poet has said :— 


“Only the chemist can tell, and not always the chemist, 
What will result from compounding 
Fluids or solids. 
And who can tell 
How men and women will interact 
On each other, or what children will result? 
There were Benjamin Pantier and his wife, 
Good in themselves, but evil towards each other; 
He oxygen, she hydrogen, 
Their son, a devasting fire.’’ } 


Even if we knew how to produce children with cer- 
tain characteristics, we are not yet agreed, as even 


1 Spoon River Anthology, by Edgar Lee Masters, p. 16. 


THE QUALITY OF POPULATION 159 


Dean Inge admits, as to what we should breed for. 
“The two ideals,” he says, “that of the perfect man 
and that of the perfectly organized State, would lead 
to very different principles of selection. Do we want 
a nation of beautiful and moderately efficient Greek 
gods, or do we want human mastiffs for policemen, 
human greyhounds for postmen, and so on?” 

Many of us would answer that we do not want either 
the one or the other; we would much rather have the 
present varieties of human beings! 


§ 7. The Relative Importance of Heredity and Environ- 
ment. When we turn from ultimate ideals to the prac- 
tical issues of the day, we find a real and important 
conflict of opinion between those who lay stress on 
the influence of heredity and those who concentrate 
on that of environment. Measures of social ameliora- 
tion, such as those enumerated above, are generally 
viewed with grave suspicion by the former as being 
calculated to encourage the reproduction of inferior 
types at the expense of their superiors. The latter, on 
the other hand, frequently urge the adoption of still 
more drastic means for improving the conditions under 
which the majority of children are born and reared. 
The endowment of motherhood, and the enactment 
of a national minimum wage, are characteristic proj- 
ects of this school of thought. There is much, of 
course, to be said on both sides in this controversy. 
The eugenists have not yet succeeded in proving that 
there is any close correlation between wealth and 
quality, though their case against social reforms de- 
pends mainly upon the assumption that such a corre- 


1Qutspoken Essays, 2d series, p. 175. 


160 POPULATION 


lation exists. In emphasizing the part played by he- 
redity they seem to forget that the bluest blood may be 
poisoned by the diseases bred in slums, and that the 
noblest intellect may be obscured by misuse in early 
life. Gray’s familiar lines— : 


“Some village Hampden that with dauntless breast 
The little tyrant of his fields withstood, 
Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest, 
Some Cromwell, guiltless of his country’s blood.” 


may still contain a lesson of some importance for the 
world. The measures designed to give equality of 
opportunity to the children of all classes may not only 
satisfy the sense of justice, but also enrich the world | 
by opening up great reservoirs of hidden talent. More- 
over, they may raise the average standard of efficiency 
in the ordinary business of life—an object of first-rate 
importance in view of the increasing difficulty in mam- 
taining Western standards of civilization. 


§ 8. The Relation between Quantity and Quality of Pop- 
ulation. The socialist, however, is apt to ignore al- 
together the reaction which his policy may have upon 
the growth of population. In placing upon the com- | 
munity the whole burden of supporting and educating 
the children of the poor he does not, as a rule, stipu- 
late that the community should have any voice as to 
the number of children to be brought into existence. It 
is true that an improvement in material circumstances 
has in recent years been accompanied by a lower birth- 
rate in the class affected, but this has probably been 
due mainly to prudential considerations depending 
upon the precarious nature of the advance in com- 


THE QUALITY OF POPULATION 161 


fort which has been secured. There is no reason 
- to suppose that a national minimum standard of 
life provided by the community, irrespective of the 
efforts of individuals, would have the same result. 
It is true that decent civilized people cannot let 
their neighbors starve to death while they them- 
selves have any surplus over the bare necessities 
of life; but to admit the strength and excellence of 
that humanitarian instinct is a very different thing 
from saying, as many people say nowadays, that every 
human being has a ght to a certain standard of life 
and comfort. That is a claim that could not be ad- 
mitted, without courting disaster, by any community 
which did not at the same time take upon itself the 
difficult task of regulating the birth-rate. The argu- 
ments used by Malthus to refute the dreams of God- 
win and Condorcet as to the perfectibility of man and 
the prospect of banishing poverty and misery from 
the life of humanity, are valid to-day in answer to the 
extreme socialist. Until there is some guarantee that 
population will not increase up to the means of sub- 
sistence there can be no security for a national stand- 
ard of life. Until some more effective means of re- 
stricting the birth-rate is discovered it is necessary to 
insist upon the responsibility of a parent for the sup- 
port of his child. 

Economic considerations, based mainly on the quan- 
titative aspect of the problem of population, point, 
then, to an attitude midway between those adopted 
by the eugenist and the socialist. Even if it were clearly 
established that the children of unskilled laborers were 
the best that could be born, it would still be desirable, 
for the urgent economic reasons discussed in the fore- 


162 POPULATION 


going chapters, that the birth-rate among unskilled 
laborers should be reduced. Most economists would 
probably agree, therefore, with the advocates of eugen- 
ics in seeking to increase the practice of birth-control 
among that class. Apart from direct propaganda, 
however, the most effective means towards that end 
appear to be a rise in the standard of life, improved 
social conditions and better housing accommodation, 
as long as these benefits are not obtained at the ex- 
pense of parental responsibility. Here the econo- — 
mist will find himself in accord with the socialist, up 
to a certain point, though he may soon part company 
with him again as to the measure of social ameliora- 
tion which is practicable in this hard world. The econ- 
omist is bound to recognize that the wants of man- 
kind are manifold while the means of satisfying those 
wants are severely limited. That is a fact which is 
disguised by inequalities in the distribution of wealth. 
Some few people have such an impressive display of 
goods and such a large claim upon the labor of others 
that it is difficult to believe that there is not enough 
wealth even in this rich country to make everybody 
comfortable. Nevertheless, as Professor Bowley has 
shown, the total income of Great Britain in 1913 di- - 
vided equally among the population would have yielded 
only £154 for an average family, or about £260 at the 
present value of money. In order substantially to 
improve the conditions of life in this country, there- 
fore, it is absolutely necessary to increase the produc- 
tivity of labor. Indeed, one may go further and say 
that, in view of the increasing competition of coun- 
tries with greater natural resources, it is necessary to 
increase productivity in order to maintain the stand- 


THE QUALITY OF POPULATION 163 


ard of life represented by Professor Bowley’s figures. 
There is reason to believe that much could be achieved 
in this direction if labor would co-operate whole-heart- 
edly in industry. The economist will therefore look 
very sympathetically at all schemes which are de- 
signed to encourage that spirit of co-operation, either 
by increasing the share of the product which goes to 
the workman, or by associating him more closely in 
the management of industry. For a discussion of the 
‘ways in which the present industrial system may be 
modified, the reader is referred to another volume in 
this series. Here it is only necessary to add that co- 
operation will not be promoted by raising hopes of a 
standard of comfort which cannot be reached. 

We are living to-day in a world of men who can only 
maintain themselves by the most intricate system of 
co-operation between individuals, classes, nations and 
races. Yet the dominant note is one of conflict. Every 
few years the fittest members of the community are 
selected to be taken away from their wives in the prime 
of life; a large proportion of them are killed, and many 
of the survivors are permanently reduced to a lower 
standard of health. Meanwhile the intercourse be- 
tween nations is interrupted, and the relations between 
the classes in each community are embittered by the 
consequences of war. 

In internal affairs, practical men, whether they call 
themselves eugenists, or socialists, or “average sen- 
sual men,’ are bound to recognize that, in this country 
at any rate, we are committed for many years to come 
to an industrial civilization and a more or less demo- 
cratic form of government. Freedom of choice is there- 
fore narrowed down to an attempt to preserve and 


164 POPULATION 


accentuate the present distinctions of class and wealth, 
or an attempt, within the limits of restricted material 
resources, to improve the social environment of the 
working classes. The former policy would be designed 
to maintain an aristocracy of birth (in which the 
middle classes are now generally included) in a posi- 
tion from which they could impose their will upon 
their social and, it is assumed, their racial inferiors, 
to the benefit of all concerned. The latter policy 
would be designed to develop the latent qualities of 
mind and body and character which lie obscured by 
poverty, and to permit an educated democracy to 
select and control its own rulers. It would be absurd, 
however, to suggest that the alternatives are likely 
to be considered on their merits from a racial stand- 
point. The dominant consideration with most people 
is, and perhaps ought to be, the sense that there is 
something wrong with a community in which extreme 
wealth and extreme poverty exist side by side, and 
that everybody who is brought into the world ought to 
be given a fair chance to develop into a satisfactory 
human being. The main contribution which economics 
can make at present in this discussion is to point out 
that this aspiration can only be realized if the national — 
output of wealth increases more rapidly than the pop- 
ulation. 


CHAPTER IX 
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 


“But a multitude of wise men is salvation to the world; 
and an understanding king is tranquillity to his people.” 


Wisdom vi, 24. 


§ 1. Recapitulatory. It is not the purpose of this hand- 
book to arrive at definite conclusions on population 
problems, or to advocate the adoption of any particular 
course of action. Its purpose is to indicate the nature 
of those problems and to point out some of the factors 
- which must be taken into account if a sound opinion 
is to be formed on the subject. It may be useful, 
therefore, to give here a brief summary of the general 
situation outlined in the foregoing chapters. 
“Through the animal and vegetable kingdoms,” as 
Malthus said, ‘“‘Nature has scattered the seeds of life 
abroad with the most profuse and liberal hand; but 
has been comparatively sparing in the room and the 
nourishment necessary to rear them.’’ Thus all plants 
and animals have a tendency to increase beyond the 
means which nature provides for their subsistence, and 
only a small proportion of young plants and animals 
- ean grow to maturity. Man was completely subject to 
the same law, until he learned to increase the supply 
of human food yielded by nature, through the culti- 
vation of plants and animals specially adapted to his 
needs. Even then he was only freed to a small extent 
165 


166 POPULATION 


from the general restrictive rule, for all his efforts 
could not produce enough food to provide for more 
than an infinitesimal part of the children that could 
be born. Finding that the tortoise could not overtake 
the hare, primitive man seems to have done his best 
to persuade the hare to go to sleep, for everywhere 
among primitive peoples one at least of three devices 
for the limitation of numbers—abortion, infanticide, - 
or prolonged abstention from intercourse—has been 
found to prevail. One of these checks to population, 
that of infanticide, probably had an eugenic influence, 
for it would naturally be the weakly children who were 
first sacrificed; and the natural check of privation 
may have had a similar tendency to select the least 
fit for destruction. The progress of civilization has 
enabled man to exercise a constantly increasing con- 
trol over nature, and to wring a larger and larger sup- 
ply of food from the earth, but never, probably, until 
the middle of the nineteenth century, has human sub- 
sistence been brought within measurable distance of 
the reproductive power of the race. At that period, 
the rapid development of immense natural resources 
in North America, rendered possible by the no less 
rapid development in Europe, and especially in Great — 
Britain, of coal and iron and the manufactures depend- 
ent upon them, gave to the white races of Western 
Europe the extraordinary experience of a supply of 
things for human consumption increasing even more 
rapidly than the population could do with an almost 
unrestricted birth-rate. Increasing returns to every 
dose of capital and labor applied either to agriculture 
in the New World or to manufacturing in the Old were, 
for a time, obtained. The standard of living rose; the 


SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 167 


cost of living continued to fall, and man’s conquest 
over nature seemed well-nigh complete. Then it was 
that, in spite of the warning voices of Mill and Jevons, 
the progress of the human race towards material and 
spiritual perfection was generally in Western Europe 
believed to be continuous and inevitable. Malthus, 
with his Principle of Population, and Ricardo, with 
his Law of Diminishing Returns, were discredited. 


§ 2. A Forecast by Malthus. There is a curious passage 
in Malthus’s Essay which might have given the op- 
timists cause for thought. It has not been quoted in 
the earlier chapters of this handbook, and the reader 
who has grasped the situation sketched therein will 
appreciate the significance of this forecast: 


“Tn the wildness of speculation,’”’ wrote Malthus, ‘it has 
been suggested (of course more in jest than in earnest) that 
Europe ought to grow its corn in America, and devote itself 
solely to manufactures and commerce, as the best sort of di- 
vision of the labour of the globe. But even on the extrava- 
gant supposition that the natural course of things might lead 
to such a division of labour for a time, and that by such means 
Europe could raise a population greater than its lands could 
possibly support, the consequences ought justly to be dreaded. 
It is an unquestionable truth that it must answer to every 
territorial state, in its natural progress to wealth, to manu- 
facture for itself, unless the countries from which it had pur- 
chased its manufactures possess some advantages peculiar to 
them besides capital and skill. But when upon this principle 
America began to withdraw its corn from Europe and the 
agricultural exertions of Europe were inadequate to make up 
the deficiency, it would certainly be felt that the temporary 
advantages of a greater degree of wealth and population (sup- 
posing them to have been really attained) had been very 


168 POPULATION 


dearly purchased by a long period of retrograde movements 
and misery.” ! 


The division of labor between America and Europe 
was, of course, at no time so complete as in this ‘ex- 
travagant supposition.”’ Before the war, Russia was re- 
sponsible for a quarter of the world’s export of wheat; 
France was self-supporting; Germany grew nearly 80 
per cent of her own food and drew considerable sup- 
plies from her south-eastern neighbors. Neverthe- 
less, the picture is near enough to the truth, especially 
as far as Great Britain is concerned, to be disquiet- 
ing. Europe has certainly attained “‘a greater degree 
of wealth and population” through such a division of 
labor with America than she would otherwise have 
achieved; America has begun “to withdraw its corn 
from Europe,” and it still remains to be seen whether 
“a, long period of retrograde movements and misery” 
will be averted. 


§ 3. The World’s Resources. A survey of the world’s 
resources is to some extent reassuring. An immense 
increase in the food supply through the intensive culti- 
vation of vast areas in Canada, South America and 
Siberia is to be anticipated. Raw cotton may in time 
be rescued in America from its arch-enemy the boll 
weevil, and other sources of supply may be developed. 
Wool gives no immediate cause for anxiety. Coal and 
iron still exist in large quantities both in America and 
Europe; oil is an unknown quantity; water-power 
awaits development, and electrical power offers great 
economies in the use of fuel. The chief cause for anx- 


1 Hssay, Book III, Chap. XII. 


SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 169 


ilety lies in the changing ratio of exchange between 
the manufactures of Europe and the raw products of 
other countries. Therein lies the danger of a decline 
in the standard of life available for the masses of 
workers congregated in the industrial centers. Europe 
has suffered a catastrophic collapse through the war, 
and the danger is that the unseen and little heeded 
pressure of population upon natural resources may 
retard, or even prohibit, the recovery of pre-war pros- 
perity. 


§4. The Way Out. There are two ways in which man- 
kind can meet the situation which threatens to arise. 
One is by increasing the productivity of labor; the 
other by restricting the birth-rate. Both measures 
appear to be necessary if the world is to be a tolerable 
place in the years to come. Both are unfortunately 
impeded by the failure of nations and classes to co- 
operate fully with one another for the common good. 
The international division of labor has enabled the 
present vast population to come into existence, but it 
is now being obstructed by measures dictated by na- 
tional jealousies, while statesmen strive to increase 
still further the number of their citizens to serve the 
ends of war. Meanwhile, the classes within each state 
materially reduce the product of industry by quarrel- 
ling over its distribution; and the most tragic element 
in the position is that as the population becomes 
larger and the productivity of labor is reduced, the 
nations and classes have more real cause for strife. 
In spite of the efforts of statesmen, however, the 
birth-rate is declining in all the countries of Western 
civilization, and there are reasons for thinking that 


170 POPULATION 


the decline is mainly due to the deliberate limitation 
by married people of the size of their families. This 
fact gives rise to the hope that mankind may in time 
assume the conscious control of one of the greatest 
forces by which the richness or poverty, the happiness 
or misery, of his life on the earth is determined—the 
power of population. It is also held by some people 
to justify the further hope that, when the science of 
genetics reaches an advanced stage of development, 
some rational method of selecting the parents of fu- 
ture generations may be introduced. Positive eu- 
genics is, however, a dream for the distant future; to 
some of us it is not even a pleasant dream; for the pres- 
ent the only practicable project advocated by respon- 
sible geneticists is the enforced celibacy of a small 
minority of the population who are demonstrably un- 
fit for parenthood. 


§ 5. Possible Scientific Developments. Having con- 
cluded this brief restatement of the population prob- 
lem, as the present writer sees it, it may be well to 
anticipate two general criticisms. One such criticism 
is that no account has been taken of the possibility 
that science may show the way by which a sudden © 
leap forward can be taken in the control of nature 
and the means of subsistence immeasurably increased. 
Professor Soddy, for instance, bids us, in eloquent and 
inspiring language, to look confidently for such a devel- 
opment. 


“Until the twentieth century had entered its opening dec- 
ade,’”’ he writes, “a thoughtful observer of the social conse- 
quences of science would have seen in the revolution cause 
for profound uneasiness. Here was no stable or enduring 


SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 171 


development, but rather the accelerating progress of the 
spendthrift to destruction, so soon as the inheritance had 
been squandered and the inevitable day of reckoning arrived. 
When coal and oil were exhausted, and the daily modicum 
of sunlight represented once again, as of yore, the whole pre- 
carious means of livelihood of the world, the new inanimate 
servant of science, like the slaves of the ancients, would prove 
a dangerous helpmate, and the mushroom civilization it had 
engendered would dissolve like the historic empires of the 
past, this time submerging the world. 

““,..No one had guessed the original source of the 
stream of energy which rejuvenates the universe, nor that 
it has its rise, not in the unfathomable immensities of space, 
but in the individual atoms of matter all round. In so far 
as it is dominated by the supply of available energy, the 
limits of the possible expansion and development of the race 

_in the future have been virtually abolished by this discovery 
of the immanence of the physical sources of life and motion 
in the universe. 

“Painfully and with infinite slowness man has crawled 
to the elevation from which he can envisage his eventful 
past as a whole from one standpoint, as that of a struggle, 
still largely internecine rather than co-operative, for a miser- 
ably inadequate allowance of energy. He looks back across 
the gulf of time from the day of the nameless and forgotten 
savage, who first discovered the art of kindling a fire, to him- 
self, his logical descendant, master of a world largely nour- 
ished by the energy of fuel, and humming with the music of 
inanimate machinery. ... The main stream (of energy) 
sweeps past his doors, and the great gulf that yawns between 
him and the consummation of his emancipation looks small 
enough compared with the gulf that yawns behind. 

“ ... The energy is there, but the knowledge of how to 
liberate it at will and apply it to useful ends is not—not yet. 

“The problem will be solved when we have learned how 
to transmute one kind of element into another at will, and 


172 POPULATION 


not before. It may well take science many years, possibly 
even centuries, to learn how to do this, but already the quarry 
is in full view and, by numerous routes, investigators are 
starting off in hot pursuit. We need only recall the past his- 
tory of the progress of science to be assured that, whether 
it takes years or centuries, artificial transmutation and the 
rendering available of a supply of energy as much beyond 
that of fuel as the latter is beyond brute energy will be even- 
tually affected. 

“Tt is unlikely, but not impossible, that such a discovery 
might be made almost at once... .”? 


It has seemed worth while to quote at some length 
from Professor Soddy, because he admirably expresses 
a view which is widely held by others who cannot 
claim to share his scientific eminence. It will be seen 
that the Professor takes an extreme view of the pre- 
carious nature of the sources of energy upon which 
the industrial life of the world is at present based. In 
his opinion, however, all cause for anxiety on this score 
has been removed by the discovery of radium, which 
has revealed the fact that an inexhaustible supply of 
energy can be released from the atom by the trans- 
mutation of elements. Professor Soddy’s almost 
religious faith that science will in time find out how to 
liberate this energy, at will, seems to a layman to be 
based on rather slender foundations. 

Pure scepticism, however, could not be held to 
justify us in ignoring the possibility of a scientific 
development which would revolutionize the situation; 
for, even if Professor Soddy’s forecast were proved to 
be unsound, there are other conceivable discoveries, 


1 Science and Life, by Frederick Soddy, M. A., F. R. 8., pp. 
13, 14, 15, 35 and 36. 


SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 173 


such as those of synthetic chemistry, which ought to 
be examined. The solid ground for leaving all such 
speculations out of account is that they are all neces- 
sarily concerned with a vague future. The pessimist 
who anticipates a catastrophe to the human race five 
hundred years or one thousand years hence, must take 
into account these possibilities of science; but the 
foregoing chapters have been devoted to a considera- 
tion of immediate problems. Again and again it has 
been pointed out that the issue is not whether popula- 
tion will in course of time outrun the means of sub- 
sistence; not whether the coal-fields of Great Brit- 
ain will eventually be exhausted; but whether the 
silent pressure of excessive numbers on the food supply 
is now being felt in the form of unemployment, rising 
prices and encroachments upon the standard of life 
in the industrial centers. To the patient scientist the 
difference between a few years and a few centuries is 
almost trivial; to the economist, time is all impor- 
tant. The factors discussed in this handbook may, if 
they are not modified, destroy Western civilization 
in a few years; it may be that they have already un- 
dermined its foundations. Perhaps the scientist can 
and will transform the situation. It is the business of 
economics to point out how and where the situation 
is at present menacing, and to call upon science for 
prompt assistance. 


§6. The Value of Discussion. Another general criti- 
cism, which may be anticipated, is that it is useless 
to point out evils in human society unless appropriate 
remedies such as can be embodied in Acts of Parlia- 
ment, or some equally concrete form, are at the same 


174 POPULATION 


time indicated. Jevons evidently had an uneasy sense 
of his vulnerability to this form of criticism when he 
wrote his alarming dissertation on The Coal Question. 
Feeling an imperative need for some concrete proposal 
“towards compensating posterity for our present lay- 
ish use of cheap coal,’ he found it in “the reduction 
or paying off of the National Debt.”’ There is some- 
thing both pathetic and humorous in the reflection that 
when Jevons made this “‘bold’”’ suggestion, in 1864, 
the Debt amounted to £819,677,852. It is now about 
£8,000,000,000! 

Generally speaking, population problems cannot 
be solved by the method of legislative enactment. — 
Arising, as they do, through changes in the produc- 
tivity of labor, on the one side, and changes in the num- 
ber of human beings on the other, they lie at the root 
of some of the most pressing difficulties of social life. 
It is true that both productivity and fecundity may 
be profoundly modified by the laws and customs of 
human society; but the influence of laws and customs 
on these fundamental matters has hitherto been in- 
direct and largely unrecognized. He would be a bold 
man who would suggest, for instance, the passing of 
a law for the limitation of the size of families! | 

The population problem which Malthus, Ricardo 
and John Stuart Mill first revealed to thoughtful peo- 
ple in this country remains unsolved; and it may in- 
deed be expected to grow more acute unless its impor- 
tance is widely recognized and its implications are 
allowed to modify the habits of modern civilization 
as they appear to have modified those of primitive 
society. Man “noble in reason,” can only control the 
forces which determine the conditions of his life by 


SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 175 


‘understanding what they are and how they work. In 
the words of Huxley: “There is no alleviation to the 
sufferings of mankind except veracity of thought and 
of action, and the resolute facing of the world as it is 
when the garment of make-believe with which pious 
hands have hidden its uglier features has been stripped 
off.”’ é 


INDEX 


Alsace-Lorraine, 135 

America, division of labor with 
Europe, 167, 168; English 
in, 16; power of population, 
107; see also United States 

Argentine, 62 

Aristocracy, 154 

Asia, 120 

Asiatics, 121 

Athens, 3 

Augustus, 5 

Australasia, 104 

Australia, 74, 125, 143; white 
man and, 121 

Austria, 119 


Bacon, Francis, 9 

Bernhardi, General von, 130 

Birth control, 19, 38, 112, 116, 
153, 162, 170 

Birth-rate, 139, 169; Austra- 
lasia, 104; decline, impor- 
tance of, 117; decline ex- 
plained, 111; England and 
Wales, 100,.101; factor in- 
fluencing, 115; falling, 108; 
France, 126; in different 
classes, 1138, 150; of feeble- 
minded, 158; poverty and, 
105, 153; Sweden, 103, 104; 
United States, 111; un- 
skilled laborers, 161 

Boll weevil, 72 

Bowley, A. L., 162 

British Empire, 124, 132 


Camillus, 5 
Canada, 124, 125, 143; wheat, 
62 


Cannan, Edwin, 49; criticism 
of J.S. Mill, 51 


Capital and labor, applied to 
land, 30 

Carey, H. C., 45 

Carr-Saunders, A. M., 19, 106 

Catholic church, 107, 116 

Celibacy, enforced, 170 

Chastity, 6 

Checks to population increase, 
108, 166; natural, 11; pre- 
ventive and positive, 24; 
primitive society, 106 

China, 121 

Church Fathers, 6 

Civilization, danger to, 146, 173 

Class distinctions, 118 

Clergy, 154 

Clothing, 69 

Coal, 34; consumption, rate, 
89; exhaustion, meaning, 
82; export trade in, 90; 
Great Britain’s supremacy 
and, 78; substitutes, 91; 
world resources, 87 

Coal and iron, 34, 77 

Cod, 112 

Comparative costs, law of, 97 

Condorcet, M. J., 19 “ 

Constantine, Emperor, 6 

Co-operation, 163 

Cotton, 34; Lancashire in- 
dustry, 68; supply, 70 

Criticisms, 170 


Death-rate, 102; Australasia, 
104; England and Wales, 
102; falling, 109 

Density of population, 53, 69 

Diminishing returns, law of, 
28, 31; England, 48; illus- 
tration, 59; United States, 
86; World War and, 54, 55 


176 


INDEX 


Discussion, value of, 173 
_ Dominions, 148 


Early Christian morality, 5 

Early theories, 1 

East and west, 120, 121 

Highteenth-century views, 13 

Electricity, 93 

Emigration, 98; European atti- 
tude, 142; evils of, 146; new 
attitude toward, 140 

Energy, 171 

England, 12; ancient predic- 
tions about population 
growth, 12; mid-nineteenth 
century, 47; over-population, 
42; working classes, 37 

England and Wales, annual 
birth-rates, 100, 101 

English in America, 16 

Environment, 159 

Eugenics, 155, 170; 
tions, 158 

Europe, 9; division of labor 
with America, 167, 168; 
effects of the World War, 
135; food and, 36; iron, 95; 
aye world competition, 91, 
9 


Exhaustion of coal, 82 


limita- 


Families, relative size, 151; 
size limitation, 174 

Famines, 65 

Feeble-mindedness, 157 

Fertility in different classes, 
150 

Fisheries, 74 

Food, elasticity in supply, 62; 
Europe and, 36; Great Brit- 
ain and, 96; population as 
related to, 27, 55; pressure 
of population on supply, 64; 
raw materials and, 59; stan- 
dard of living and, 64; 
United States and, 34; War, 
effect on supply, 134, 137 

France, 14; birth-control, 113; 
birth-rate, 109, 126; external 


177 


policy, 126; problems, 125, 
135 


Franklin, Benjamin, 15 
Fuel, economy in, 80 


Genetics, 158, 170 

Germany, coal, 85; position, 
127, 136 

Griffen, Sir Robert, 129 

Godwin, William, 18, 20 

Graunt and Petty, 12 

Great Britain, 35; condition of 
supremacy according to Jev- 
ons, 78; emigration and, 143; 
food supply, 96; iron, 94; 
National Debt, 174; prob- 
lem as to food, fuel and raw 
materials, 95; water-power, 
93 

Great Powers, 123 

Greeks, population theories, 2 


Hazlitt, William, 27-28, 32, 
99 


Henderson, H. D., 1 

Heredity, 157; environment 
and, 159 

Hjort, J., 112 

Hoover, H. C., 137 

Human diversities, 120 

Human fertility, 111, 150 

Human welfare, 140 

Hume, David, 16 

Huxley, T. H., 175 


Increase of population, 99; 
economic advantages, 66 
India, checks to population, 
121; evils, 122; famine prob- 
lem, 65; over-population, 
120 

Industrial Revolution, 32, 46, 
6 


5 

Industrial system, 163 

Infant mortality, 103, 118, 
150; France, 127; in differ- 
ent classes, 151; India, 122 

Infanticide, 166; Greece, 3; 
Polynesia, 4; Rome, 4 


178 


Inge, W. R., 56, 57; ideals to 
breed for, 159; on future 
prospects of mankind, 155 

International problems, 119 

International trade, 96, 97 

Ireland, 125, 140; coal, 84 

Tron, 94: see also Coal and iron 


Japan, 120 

Jevons, W. S., correctness of 
predictions, 84, 87; on the 
coal question, a7 174 

Johnson, Dr., 99, 100, 107 


Keynes, J. M., vii; on food and 
population in Europe, 55; 
on Germany, 128 

King, Gregory, 12, 13, 100, 
101, 102, 103 


Labor, costs, 97; productivity, 
162, 169, 174; wages, 17 

Lancaster Herald, 12, 100 

Land, capital and labor applied 
to, 30; rent of, 18; supply, 29 

League of Nations, 123 

Leibnitz, G. W. von, 10 

Levasseur, M., 125 

Loane, M., 157 

London, district fertilities, 152 

Luther, Martin, 7, 8, 107 


Macaulay, T. B., 46 

Malthus, T. R., vi, 2; argu- 
ment of the Essay, 22; 
critics, 27, 28, 32, 40; disci- 
ples, 40; doctrine forgotten, 
41; Essay published, 20, 21; 
forecast, 167; forerunners, 
13; origin of his principles, 
16, 18, 20; reaction against, 
45; return of opinion to, 54 

Manufactures, 33; increasing 
returns, 67 

Markets, national competition 
for, 133 

Marriage, 106; early christian 
vole 6; working classes, 
11 


INDEX 


Material progress, v 

Methodius, 6 

Mill, James, 29, 40 

Mill, J.S., 45; criticism of his 
view, 51; on the instinct of 
population, 153; on the posi- 
tion of women, 116; views 
on population problems, 48 

Miners, 113, 117 

Misery, 25, 139 

Montesquieu, 14 

Moral restraint, 25 

More, Sir Thomas, 7 

Morocco, 133 

Mutton, 73 


National Debt, 174 

N mene differences, 118, 119, 
14 

Natural selection, 155 

New World, advantages over 
Europe, 91, 94 

Nitti, F.S., 42 


Oil resources, 91 
Over-population, 65 


Peasant class, 157 
Perfection, tendency toward, 


’ 

Physiocrats, 14, 15 

Pitt, William, 21, 40 

Plutarch, 5 

Political arithmetic, 12 

Polynesia, 4 

Poor and rich, 156 

Population, quality, 148; quan- 
tity and quality, relation, 
We war and, 130, 132, 

Poverty, children and, 105; 
J. 8. Mill on, 153 

Power of population, 66, 165, 
ae illustrated by America, 


Preface, v 
Preventive checks. 
Priestley, Joseph, v 
Production, 68 


See Checks 


INDEX 


- Productivity of labor, 
169, 174 

Progress of civilization, 50, 52, 
66 


162, 


Progressive state, 80, 98 
Protection, 48; policy, 85 


Race differences, 118, 119 

Raleigh, Sir Walter, 8; on war, 
130 

Raw materials, cost, 67; food 
and, 59; national competi- 
tion for, 133 

Rent of land, Adam Smith on, 
18 


Resources, transference in time 
of war, 61 

Reynolds, Stephen, 156 

Ricardo, David, 29, 40, 48, 45 

Rich and poor, 156 

Romans, population theories, 
2 


Russia, 99; famine and popu- 
lation, 65; position, 129, 1386 


Saleeby, C. W., 150 
Science, possible developments, 


Sex disparity, 148 

Sexual passion, 19 

Shaw, Bernard, 153 

Sheep, 74 

Shrinking earth analogy, 59 

Sixteenth and seventeenth- 
century views, 7 

Smith, Adam, 16 

Social question, greatest, vil 

Social reforms, 159 

Socialists, 160 

Soddy, Frederick, 170, 172 

Solon, 3 

Sozomen, 6 

Sparta, 3 

Standard of living, 54, 66, 97, 
114, 161; food supply and, 
64; war and, 138 

Stangeland, C. E., 10, 19 

State, duty to, 9; progressive 
and stationary, 98 


179 


Statistics, 100 

Summary, 165 

Siissmilch, J. P., 11 

Sweden, birth-rate, 103, 104 
Synthetic chemistry, 173 


asst policy of America, 85, 


Textile workers, 113, 114, 117 
Theories, 40 

Thirty Years War, 9, 134 
Thompson, Warren §8., 52 
Transmutation of energy, 172 
Turgot, A. R. J., 29, 30 


Unborn multitudes, 66 

Under-population, 107 

United States, 16; food pro- 
duction and, 34; immigra- 
tion and, 140, 142; iron, 94; 
population by decades, 110; 
position, 123; protection pol- 
icy, 85; see also America 


Vice, 25, 139 
Virginity, 6 
Vital statistics, 11, 100 


Wages, Adam Smith on, 17 

Wallace, Robert, 16 

War, 8-9; as a check to popu- 
lation, 130; food supply and, 
134; population and, 138; 
pressure of population as an 
influence, 132; transference 
of resources in war time, 61 

Water-power, 91; Great Brit- 
ain, 93 

Wattal, P. K., 122 

Wealth, 70, 162, 164 

West, Edward, 43, 44 

West and East, 120, 121 

Wheat, 62 

White Australia, 121 

Wolff, Christian, 10 

Women, disparity with men, 
148; status, 116, 117 

Wool, 72 

Working classes, 114 


INDEX 


180 

World politics, 121, 123 Yule, G. .U.,', 99, 100; fats 

World’s coal resources, 87 on fertilities of London dis- 
tricts, 152 _ 


World’s resources, 168 
Wright, Harold, vi 


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